
Glass TS ■55 0'^ 
Book J?^^IB7 

PRESENTED BY 

mo 5' 



BROAD-CAST 



BROAD=CAST 



By 

ERNEST CROSBY 

Author of " Plain Talk In Psalm and Parable' 
"Tolstoy and His Message" etc. etc 



r 



FUNK and WAGNALLS COMPANY, 
44—60. East 23rd Street, 
New YorK, 
1905 



T5 3^iJ^ 



Gift 

Author 

27JI'05 



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To 
EDWARD CARPENTER 

OEER beholding things divine. 
Prophet of the olden line, — 
Trumpeting a message clear 
For the few with ears to hear, — 
What though man be deaf to-day ? 
Truth is bound to make its way. 
Soon the world will be content 
To uprear your monument. 
Pardon my impatient pen 
That it cannot wait till then. 
Fare you better, — fare you worse, 
If upon this scroll of verse 
One whom you have taught to think 
Writes your name in fading ink ? 



BROADCAST 

" OO is the kingdom of God, 

A s if one should cast seed in the ground. 
And should sleep and arise, night and day. 
And the seed should spring and grow up. 
He knoweth not how, for the earth 
Bringeth forth fruit of herself." 

Thus would I sow to the winds 

Broadcast the seed that may bear 

Fruit in the harvest to be. 

Others may rase and destroy, — 

Tear down, demolish and waste ; — 

Others may frame and construct. 

Fitting together the stones. 

As they think, of the city of God. 

Mine be the lowlier task, — 

Mine be the dropping of seed 

In the long silent furrows of earth. 

Where she bringeth forth fruit of herself. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Dedication. To Edward Carpenter ... 5 

" Seer beholding things divine." 
Broadcast " 

" So is the kingdom of God." 

Democracy ,;■'** ^ 

" I saw laws and customs and creeds." 

From the Sanscrit ,; * ' 

" As the young mother clasps her infant son." 

Stigmata Libertatis '^7 

" Tell me what the signs may be." 

God's Gift „• ^^ 

" Where is my gift," said God, " that I gave to men ? " 

The Land of the Noonday Night — A Miner's 

Song , 29 

" We have eyes to see like yours." 
The Cotton Mill ;, " ' ^^ 

" Ogre dread ! Slavery raised from the dead ! " 

The Stoker „ ^^ 

" Now and then a stoker came up to breathe 'tween decks. 

The Escutcheon 35 

•• Pounce on the innocent, Powers-that-be ! " 

Coronal 3" 

" Lo, the peoples, — all of them, — " 
Beatus Ille ^ • • 37 

" Happy the man who, probing what is meant." 
To St. Francis of Assisi 37 

" Dear Francis, did Assisi's burghers frown." 

The School of Riches 38 

" Blessed are the poor who know." 

Look Sharp ! 39 

" Look sharp ! thou art one of God's eyes." 

Not a Christian 4° 

" So you condemn him once for all." 

Buddha 4° 

" Passionless, contemplative, free from desire." 

Religion 41 

" The childish mistaking of pictures for facts." 

Cain 4i 

" Nay, flee not from me." 

To Nero 45 

" Nero, old dog, I see myself looking out." 

7 



8 CONTENTS 

PAGE 

April 49 

" See the apple orchard." 

Spring Thoughts 50 

" The leaves are not yet out." 

Worship 59 

" Bow before God in prone humility." 

In the Garden 59 

" I spied beside the garden bed." 

Wine of Eternity 60 

" God took a vial from its place." 

Yesterday 61 

" To-day and to-morrow will change " 

Moods 62 

" There is nothing but moods." 

The Seers 72 

" Like mountain peaks." 
In the Saddle 72 

" Mounted on Ahmar, flying at a mad run." 
On the Suez Canal 74 

" a starry night on the Suez Canal ! " 

Christmas 76 

" On the first of the lengthening days." 

Judge Not 78 

" Why do I punish ? " 
Town Pictures 79 

" I have travelled many ways." 
Country Pictures 96 

" Tramping down the broad green valley." 

The Living Universe 102 

" What are you, stars of night ? " 

Love 104 

" When I thought you were perfect." 
God's Window 106 

" God has a house that's wide and tall." 
My Soul 107 

" What must I do to be saved ? " 
My Soul again 120 

" ' Here where I live ' — thus spake my soul. " 

You 121 

" I would not break your will." 

Microcosm 121 

" I split a grain of common sand." 
A Prayer 122 

" Come to me, woo me, Soul of the All ! " 

Hints 122 

" Little care we for the mark." 
Apologia 123 

" I pulled up the flowers in my garden." 

Afterthought - 126 

" When these new ideas of ours become trite." 



Democracy 

I 

I SAW laws and customs and creeds and 
Bibles rising like emanations from men 
and women. 
I saw the men and women bowing down and 
worshipping these cloudy shapes, and I 
saw the shapes turn upon them and rend 
them. 
Nay, but men and women are the supreme 
facts ! 

II 

How rarely have men revered the truly 
reverend, and respected the truly respect- 
able ! 

How much of reverence has been, and still is, 
mere fetish-worship ! 

Reverence for Moloch and Juggernaut, who 
shall count its victims ? 

Respect for tyrants and despots, for lying 
priests and blind teachers, how it has 
darkened the pages of history ! 

There is only one true respect, the respect for 
the conscious life that fulfils its true 
function. 

Revere humanity wherever you find it, in the 
judge or in the farm hand, but do not 
revere any institution or office or writing. 



10 DEMOCRACY 

As soon as anything outside of divine humanity 

is revered and respected, it becomes 

dangerous, — 
And every step forward in the annals of man 

has been over the prostrate corpse of some 

ancient unmasked reverence. 

Ill 

And yet I am no abohtionist. 

I would abolish nothing except by disuse. 

Slavery is good for those who believe in slavery, 

for in a world of slaves there must be 

masters, and men with the hearts of slaves 

had better be slaves. 
Government is good for those who believe in 

government, and punishment for those 

who believe in punishment, and war for 

those who believe in war. 
Anything is good enough for the man who 

believes in it, and the first step upward is 

not abolition but disbelief. 

IV 
They write histories of the French Revolution 

as if it were over. 
The French Revolution is not over ; it never 

will be over. 
That episode was a mere skirmish on the 

picket-line. 
The duel between oppression and freedom is 

the very essence of life. 
The French Revolution began ages before 

David gathered his Coxey army at the 



DEMOCRACY ii 

cave of Adullam, — ages before the great 
labour-leaders Moses and Aaron put them- 
selves at the head of the Hebrew brick- 
makers' strike. 
It will not end before the earth freezes into a 
Spitzbergen or is scorched into a Sahara. 

V 

The lists are open ; the combat is on. 

The brute-man of the past and the God-man 
of the future must fight it out while heaven 
and earth look on expectant. 

You can easily distinguish them by their wea- 
pons. 

The brute-man fights with claws and teeth, 
with spear and sword, with bayonet and 
cannon and bomb. 

The God-man has for his artillery naught but 
the naked truth and undissembled love. 

Yet the brute-man blanches with the sure 
presentiment of his speedy overthrow, and 
winces as the God-man gazes upon him 
with infinite compassion. 

VI 

A murder on behalf of the people ? 

That is no place for murders, — they belong on 

the other side. 
Poor, brave, cowardly, cruel fool, who thought 

the people could be helped by murder, and, 

thinking to lay low oppression, well-nigh 

laid freedom low ! 



12 DEMOCRACY 

But there are other fools, — those who suppose 
that a foul deed can for long set back the 
" 3 hands of time. 
Can a crime alter facts ? 
Can any mad assassin kill the eternal truth ? 

VII 

Clear the field for the grand tournament of 

the nations, — 
The struggle to think the best thought and to 

express it best in tone and colour and form 

and word, — 
The struggle to do the greatest deeds and lead 

the noblest and most useful lives, — 
The struggle to see clearest and know truest and 

love strongest. 
Your other blood and bludgeon contests but 

postpone the real fray. 
The true knights are yearning to enter the lists, 

and you block the high festival with your 

brawling. 
Is it possible that you mistake this horse-play 

for the real event of history ? 
Away with all your brutal disorder, and clear 

the field for the tournament of Man. 

VIII 

I do not wish to be above people ; I wish to be 

with people. 
The tiresome, hateful climb upward on their 

heads and shoulders, — 



DEMOCRACY 13 

(It hurts their heads and shoulders, but it hurts 

my feet still more), — 
The thin, empty air, thinner and emptier and 

less satisfying the higher I get, — 
The platform of envious faces on which I 

stand, — 
The continual scrambHng and elbowing round 

me and over me, — 
The aimlessness and cruelty of it all, — 
I am sick to death of it. 
The soles of my feet yearn for the feel of God's 

sod. 
I do not wish to be above people. 
I wish to be with people. 

IX 

The common people,— why common people ? 

Does it not mean common life, common aspira- 
tions, community of interests, communion 
of man with man ? 

Does it not imply the spirit of communism, of 
fellowship, of brotherhood ? 

Does it not suggest that human life down at the 
bottom is more fluid and intermingled and 
social than up at the top ? 

Is not all this hidden away in the words " com- 
mon people ? " 

X 

Would you make brothers of the poor by giv- 
ing to them ? 



14 DEMOCRACY 

Try it, and learn that in a world of injustice it 

is the most unbrotherly of acts. 
There is no gulf between men so wide as the 

alms-gift. 
There is no wall so impassable as money given 

and taken. 
There is nothing so unfratemal as the dollar, — it 

is the very symbol of division and discord. 
Make brothers of the poor if you will, but do it 

by ceasing to steal from them ; 
For charity separates and only justice unites. 

XI 

Peace between capital and labour, is that all 

that you ask ? 
Is peace then the only thing needful ? 
There was peace enough in southern slavery. 
There is a peace of life and another peace of 

death. 
It is well to rise above violence. 
It is well to rise superior to anger. 
i But if peace means final acquiescence in 

wrong, — if your aim is less than justice 

and peace, forever one — then your peace 

is a crime, y 

XII 

I am homesick, — 

Homesick for the home that I never have 
seen, — 



DEMOCRACY 15 

For the land where I shall look horizontally 

into the eyes of my fellows, — 
The land where men rise only to lift, — 
The land where equality leaves men free to 

differ as they will, — 
The land where freedom is breathed in the air 

and courses in the blood, — 
Where there is nothing over a man between him 

and the sky, — 
Where the obligations of love are sought for as 

prizes and where they vary with the moon. 
/That land is my true country. I am here by -^,,^ %^^) 

some sad cosmic mistake, — and I am 

homesick./ 



XIII 

A strange lot this, to be dropped down in a 
world of barbarians, — 

Men who see clearly enough the barbarity of all 
ages except their own, — 

Who shudder at the thought of wheel and fag- 
got, of putrid heads displayed not so long 
ago on Temple Bar,— of stinking corpses 
hanging in chains along the highways while 
vultures devoured them, — of mere boys 
put to death for stealing a shilling, — and 
who notwithstanding are snugly contented 
with the survival of gibbets and the happy 
invention of electrocution chairs, — 

Who are outraged at the picture of black priests 
hovering about the flames of an auto-da-fe, 



i6 DEMOCRACY 

but applaud their successors to-day as they 
encourage with their blessings the butchery 
of war, — 

Who deplore the ancient miseries of the galleys, 
the torture of witnesses, the agonies of 
captives crucified or given to the lions, but 
see nothing wrong in our overcrowded 
prisons, our vice-breeding jails and our 
cold, relentless machine of justice, — 

Who look down on the ages when there were no 
societies for the prevention of cruelty to 
animals, and yet are blind to the horrors 
of our abattoirs and laboratories, and take 
pleasure in killing and maiming helpless 
birds and harmless little brother beasts, — 

Who condemn the brutality of the Spanish In- 
quisition, but sanction the writhing pains 
of the battle-field, the sabred face, the 
d37namite gun and the dum-dum bullet, — 

Who abhor chattel slavery, but accept the dis- 
mal, hopeless enslavement of factory hands 
and the starvation of thousands out of 
work as heaven-born arrangements, — 

Who sing paeans over the fall of political des- 
potism, while they have scarcely a word 
of criticism for the industrial tyrants who 
tread us under foot, — 

And who — strangest of all — are absolutely 
ignorant of the fact that future generations 
will consider them just as barbarous as 
their predecessors. 

It is a curious destiny indeed to be planted in 
the midst of such a people. 



DEMOCRACY 17 

XIV 

And yet they boast of their high breeding and 
accuse us of despising it. 

Despise high breeding ? Nay, but we should be 
fools indeed to throw overboard such a 
treasure. 

Good manners, the nice sense of what is fitting, 
the refinement which is so difficult to learn 
in a single lifetime, — far be it from us to 
risk these hard-earned possessions of the 
race in any social cataclysm. 

But is it not you, rather, who put them in 
peril — 

You who would monopolize these gifts and re- 
strict them to your narrow circle ; you, who 
hoard them like your gold and silver ; — 
who find the chief value of them in the 
fact that others have them not ? 

"Noblesse oblige," fine thought, — fair flower of 
feudalism, foretelling a summer of even 
fairer bloom. But " Manhood obhges," 
is not that finer still ? 

What are good manners but the traditional 
expression of a good heart ? 

They are the small change of unselfishness, and 
if the heart is not pure metal, they ring 
false on the counter. 

If you are selfish within — if you wish to keep 

these graces to yourselves, — by that very 

fact they become the cheap trimmings of 

hypocrisy. 

As for us, we would make unselfishness common 

B. B 



i8 DEMOCRACY 

to all, and the natural expression of it in 

outward life would follow. 
We have nothing against aristocracy, — we wish 

to spread it abroad and its manners. 
We herald the advent of the true aristocracy, 

the rule of the best over the worst in every 

human soul. 
We would not for the world rob mankind of one 

gracious word or action ; 
But our aim is to make of the treasures which 

you lock up in your palaces the common 

coin of the realm. 

XV 

The few, with their accumulation of money, 

shall not rule. 
Have we rid ourselves of kings for nothing ? 
Is an exorbitant railway fare or telegraph charge 

less tyrannous taxation than ship-money 

or a duty on tea ? 
Charles the First and George the Third have 

risen from the dead, but industrial equality 

will come as political equality came. 
Our fathers died for the shadow, — we demand 

the substance. 
The few shall not rule. 

XVI 

It was all so simple in the old days, when people 
saw, or thought they saw, tyranny and 
oppression centred in one person, and in 



DEMOCRACY 19 

attacking and destroying that person were 
sure they were saving mankind. 

How easy it is to treat a boil just as a boil and 
to forget the corrupt blood that produced 
it, running into every nook and cranny of 
the body ! 

To-day, alas, the tyrant spreads like a vicious 
kind of nervous system throughout the 
entire frame of society. 

I am part tyrant, part slave, as we all are in 
varying degree, and there seems to be no 
other alternative possible. 

We are caught in the meshes of our own web. 

We must disentangle the tyrant from us, and 
this new Gordian knot will not yield its 
secret to the sword. 

We must thresh the chaff from the corn, and 
each grain has its separate outworn casing 
waiting to be winnowed away. 

Alas, it is no simple rebellion on the old lines 
that calls for our adhesion and support ; 

It is rather a complicated labour of unravelling 
and extricating and liberating from the net- 
work of poisonous creepers of the ages, 
whose roots are in our own hearts. 

XVII 

Democracy, what called you into being ? 

What induced you to persist in strugghng for 
centuries to tear off your chains, one after 
another ? • - ■ 

It was the longing for freedom, the desire to 



20 DEMOCRACY 

grow and develop and thrive untrammelled 
and unrestrained, the determination to 
have no masters but your own wisdom and 
conscience and will. 

Now that you have nearly reached the goal, — 
now that you have almost achieved the 
task, — how is it that you have forgotten 
your object and renounced the freedom for 
which you began the strife ? 

Instead of knocking off the last shackles you 
are busy patching and riveting your broken 
chains. 

You are having recourse to restriction and 
interference, tying the hands of those who 
would aid you, hampering the free play of 
the nation's life. 

Will you be your own Napoleon, bringing your 
own revolution to naught to usher in again 
the old regime ? 

Beware, beware of chains, though they be of 
your own making ; they were ever your 
curse, and how can they become a blessing? 

You have rid yourselves of your ancient tryants, 
but their death was in vain if you try to 
adopt their manner of reigning. 

Stretch forth your free arms, breathe the un- 
limited air, and think no more of using 
force against your members. 

y XVIII 

Liberty, sad, dethroned queen, though all the 
world turn against you, I will be true to 
you. V 



DEMOCRACY 21 

Dragged in triumph at the wheel of Coercion's 
chariot, — bowed down, dishevelled, foot- 
sore, — though you be, — 

Though the fickle populace, which but yester- 
day hailed your accession with frantic joy, 
now hoot and hiss you and deride, — 

Yet I still perceive the majesty of your mien 
and look and gait, and I acknowledge my- 
self proudly to be your loyal subject. 

Why have the people changed ? 

Do they say that you did not give them the 
prosperity that you promised ? 

Ah, but when did they ever trust you with even 
half the power ? 

When did they ever fairly wrest your realm 
from the sway of your victorious rival ? 

His acts of tyranny have ever afflicted the land. 

He always held tight in his fetters the soil, the 
source of all, and trade, the distributor of 
all. 

Were they so foolish as to charge these wrongs 
to you ? 

Because Coercion bore heavily upon the people, 
must they for this extend his rule so as to 
make, as it were, a balance of his mis- 
deeds ? 

Shout for the usurper, you mad, incoherent 
throng ! 

Little reck you that he will add to your yoke, 
and, where there were whips, chastize you 
with scorpions. 

Many a weary year may pass along, ere you 
bethink you again of your lawful queen. 



22 DEMOCRACY 

XIX 

Dear America ! 

Vast, vigorous, boastful, untidy mother ! 

I dwell upon your faults, not as an unfilial son, 

but as an anxious father, — for you are my 

daughter too. 
You have made me what I am, and now it is 

my turn to make you what I would have 

you be. 
Let others toil to prepare you fitting millinery ; 
Let them seek to assure you health and strength 

of body ; 
My part will rather be to aid quietly in forming 

your soul. 
If we can but succeed in creating for you a 

spirit commensurate with your greatness, 

the rest will take care of itself. 
The folds of your garments, the lines of your 

face and figure, will surely take on the 

beauty of your soul. 
What nobler task is there on earth than shap- 
ing the soul of a people ? 



XX 

To make men pull together, — 

That was the aim which civilization set before 

itself ; 
Men pulled together at the word of command ; 
The pyramids rose, Rome swallowed the earth, 

— men worked long and wearily and 



DEMOCRACY 23 

without a doubt that here was the finahty 
of things. 

Their dreamers and sages and saints could pic- 
ture no golden age without slaves, 

And the strong arm of the law made them toil. 

But man grew, and looked, and asked why, 
and slavery shrivelled and died. 

And still the object was to make men pull to- 
gether. 

And the wage-system showed the way. 

One man grasped all the good things he could 
and hugged them, and said to those who 
had none, " Work for me and I will give 
you a little." 

Men pulled together again with hunger in their 
eyes ; 

Factories sprang up, railways encircled the 
earth, — men laboured long and eagerly 
and without a doubt that here was the 
finality of things. 

Their dreamers and sages and saints could pic- 
ture no golden age without the wage- 
system. 

And the strong arm of the law guarded the piles 
of good things and let the men go, 

For now men strove to get work, and it was 
no one's interest to keep them through the 
winter, and the death of a man, such as 
once fetched his weight in coin, was no 
longer of consequence, for another would 
do as well. 

But man grows and looks, and asks why, and 
the wage-system quivers with terror. 



24 DEMOCRACY 

There is a new way to make men pull 

together. 
Love, free co-operation, equal service, true 

honour and honesty, — have you never 

thought of these things ? 
Let us dream better than the old-dreamers, — 

and pull together. 



/iw 



XXI 



Men's laws, — laws of tsars or of majorities 

counted by the nose — 
Call them laws if you will, but they are no laws. 
Enforce them ; drag them after you like a 

corpse in a hearse. 
No matter how long your procession, how 

grand your plumes and high-stepping 

horses. 
You are advancing to the grave, and, go as 

slow as you please, before long you will get 

there. ► 
God's laws are other than these. 
They live and breathe and enforce themselves. 
They lead the way onward with back turned 

to the cemetery. 
If only one man feels the attraction and follows, 

he becomes by that alone the autocrat of 

the world. 
When two or three join him, you have a divine 

aristocracy. 
When the people are at last won over, there is 

democracy indeed. 



DEMOCRACY 2$ 

God's laws are living germs and they quicken 
the blood in spite of votes and edicts. 



XXII 

Where are the leaders who will show us the 
way ? 

Where are the discoverers who will search out 
the secret of true living and then apply it 
in their lives ? 

We are ready to follow them. 

When they discovered the uses of steam, we 
adopted their invention although we com- 
prehended it not. 

When they lassoed the lightning, and broke it 
in, and taught it to carry our words and 
voices and bodies, and steadily to illum- 
inate the darkness, then we appropriated 
their inventions, though we did not under- 
stand them. 

When men shall have discovered the proper 
functions of human energy and the way to 
apply it to free and social living, again we 
shall not be slow to adopt their invention, 
whether it passes our comprehension or 
not. 

It is always enough that a few find the best 
path, — forthwith the world follows. 

We do not want more education or books or 
legislation. 

We have too much education, too many books, 
too many laws already. 



26 DEMOCRACY 

We need only, here and there, a leader to 
discover and apply God's laws of social 
industry, and we will throng after them ; 
not one of us will be left behind. 

XXIII 

And who will lead the way ? 

The good and wise must lead. 

He that loves most is the best and wisest and 

he it is that leads already. 
Where the best lover sits is always the head of 

the table. 
Tell the great secret to the people. 
Let the people love and they will lead. 
No cunning device of ballot-machinery can 

give them the power. 
No system of common-schools, spending its 

energies on mind alone, can give them the 

power. 
No campaign against monopoly and oppression, 

however it may promise to succeed, can 

give them the power. 
Nay, but let the people love, and theirs is the 

power ! 



From the Sanscrit 

AS the young mother clasps her infant son, 
So let us cherish, as our course we run, 
A boundless friendly mind toward every one. 



STIGMATA LIBERTATIS 27 

Stigmata Libertatis 

TELL me what the signs may be 
Which forever mark the free. 

First, they love all living things 
Humbly, — yet as proud as kings. 

Then of man they think no ill, 
Let him do whate'er he will. 

And this shows their freedom too. 
That they grant the same to you. 

Neither are they filled with woe 
Over those who ripen slow, 

For they know that, in the prime 
Of the spirit's harvest-time, 

Comes to every soul the hour 
When it opens like a flower, 

While the universe stands by, 
Ever ready to supply 

Lovingly its magic aid, — 
Never hurried, never stayed. 

Lastly, thus we know the free, 
That they live right openly. 

Standing naked as they are, 
Unabashed by sun or star. 

For they deem it grievous sin 
To secrete the truth within. 

Each of these is freedom's sign. 
How I wish that it were mine ! 



28 GOD'S GIFT 

God's Gift 

WHERE is my gift," said God, "that I 
gave to men — 
The sun-wed, fruitful earth, with her freight of 

good 
For all their wants ? What mean these prayers 

for food ? 
Are there poor in a world which bursts with its 

golden stores ? 
Who are the few that dare to withhold from all 
My gift to all of the fruitful, sun-wed earth ? " 

And the few replied : " O, Lord, we give Thee 
thanks. 

Thou gavest the earth to all, it is true, but lo ! 

Thy angels. Law and Order, who rule the world 

When Thou art far away, have learned our 
worth. 

And rightly bestowed on us Thine inheri- 
tance." 

" I know them not," said God ; " they are 

fiends from hell 
That juggle thus with the gift that I gave to 

man. 
I am never far away from the world I gave. 
And now once more and forevermore I give 
This fruitful earth anew to the sons of men. 
Woe to the fiends who shall dare usurp my 

place ! 
Woe to the few who say that my gift is theirs ! 
Woe to the man who grasps his neighbour's 

land ! " 



LAND OF THE NOONDAY NIGHT 29 

The Land of the Noonday 
Night 

A MINER'S SONG. 

WE have eyes to see like yours 
Way down in the deep, deep mine, 
But there's nothing to mark but the dreadful 
dark 
Where the sun can never shine. 
On the banks of clammy coal 

Our lamps cast a flickering light 
At the bottom drear of the moist black hole 
In the land of the noonday night. 

We have children at home like yours, 

But at eve when we homeward tread 
We find them asleep in a tangled heap, 

Three or four in a single bed. 
In the morning our tasks begin 

Before the sun shines bright, 
For we have no sun and we have no kin 

In the land of the noonday night. 

But our home is not like yours. 

'Tis a bare, unpainted shack. 
Where the raindrops pour on the shaky floor. 

And the coal-dust stains it black. 
Not a flower or blade of grass 

Can escape the grimy blight, 
For the face of our yard is seared and scarred 

In the land of the noonday night. 

But the men who own the mines, 
And who live like kings of old — 



30 LAND OF THE NOONDAY NIGHT 

Ah ! little they care how their wage-slaves fare, 

So long as they get their gold ! 
And the fire-damp may explode 

And a thousand die outright, 
For the men come cheap who go down deep 

In the land of the noonday night. 

And like feathers they weigh the coal 

When they pay us by the head, 
But for you who buy it twice too high 

They weigh it like chunks of lead. 
And our wage goes back in rent — 

For they have us in such a plight — 
And they squeeze us sore at the company's 
store 

In the land of the noonday night. 

And we labour with straining arms 

For the pittance they deign to give, 
And our boys must quit the school for the pit 

To drudge that we all may live. 
And our teeth feel the grit of the mine 

In the very bread we bite. 
Till our inmost soul is defiled with coal 

In the land of the noonday night. 

And if in the end we dare 

To assert our just demands, 
Then their courts emit an injunction writ 

To shackle our tongues and hands. 
And if in spite of their frown 

We protest that we will unite, 
Then they lock us up or they shoot us down 

In the land of the noonday night. 



THE COTTON MILL 31 

Who was it that made the coal ? 

Our God as well as theirs ! 
If He gave it free to you and me, 

Then keep us out who dares ! 
Let the people own their mines — 

Bitumen and anthracite — 
And the right prevail under hill and dale 

In the land of the noonday night. 

The Cotton Mill 

OGRE dread ! 
Slavery raised from the dead ! 
I see you — not in the fields as of yore — 
But stalking the factory floor. 
Cracking your whip overhead. 
While pale-faced children droop in the rum- 
bling roar. 
With tiny fingers twining the hateful thread, 
And dreaming of bed. 

Half gone is the night. 

To left and right 

An acre or more of dim-lit whirr extends. 

For six dull hours' interminable length 

These babies have strained their strength ; — 

Another six must wear away 

Before, at break of day. 

Their torment ends. 

What is that piercing cry ? 

Only another thumb and finger crushed ; 

Another little hand awry. 

The cry is hushed. 



32 THE COTTON MILL 

The girl has fainted, but the surgeon comes ; 
How skilfully he cuts and binds and sews. 
Fingers to sever, and thumbs, 
How well he knows ! 
Carelessness maims and kills, 
And children will be careless in the mills. 
Now he leads her out, never to climb 
Those stairs again to earn her nightly dime. 

Yes, in this dismal hall 

Broods the angel of death. 

Many his shapes. 

He lurks in their very breath — 

In the cloud of cotton-dust that hangs like a 

pall. 
Over all. 

Strange that a child escapes. 
For dropsy, the wasting sickness, the fatal 

cough, 
Crouch, ready to carry them off. 
In a dozen years from to-day 
Half of these infant slaves 
Will sleep in forgotten graves. 
More happy there than those who stay, 
Still bound to the wheel of the mill. 
And racked and tortured still. 

Will a monument ever rise to attest 
How they fell at the Ogre's behest ? 
Yes, far away in the North 
Will a Herod's palace set forth 
Why they laboured and died ; 
For its splendours will hardly hide 



THE COTTON MILL 33 

Its foundation laid on their tombs, 
And the walls of its sumptuous rooms 
Cemented with children's blood, where lingers 
The trace of bruised and wearied flesh and 
mutilated fingers. 

Murder will out ; 

And the palace will tell 

How its corner-stone stands firm in hell 

With a shout ! 

And, who knows ? our Herod may build 

With the gold of the killed 

A church to his devilish god — his Moloch, who, 

from his throne 
Gave him the world, as he thinks, for his own. 
And asylum, and hospital, too, 
May spring from the bleaching bones 
Of these innocent ones. 
Crying to heaven the truth 
Of their massacred youth. 
And the story of Herod anew 
In an epitaph true. 

These be thy triumphs, O Trade ! 

Triumphs of peace, do they say ? — nay, of war. 

At the cannon's foul mouth afar. 

Sore afraid, 

Brown men, and yellow and black, 

Buy what they never would lack 

When the Ogre says " Buy ! " 

And with white lands as well it is war that we 

wage. 
Let them die ! [age 

Their trade must be shattered to naught in this 

B. C 



34 THE COTTON MILL 

Of the dollar supreme. 

We must conquer. Our dream 

Is a beggared world at our feet. 

So we draw up the armies of trade 

And invade, 

With the children in front, to fall first, as 

is meet — 
Children of mill and of sweat shop and mine — 
And behind them the women stand, 
Jaded and wan, in line ; 
Then come the hosts of the diggers and builders, 

artisans, craftsmen and all. 
It is fine ! 
It is grand ! 
Let them fall ! 
We are safe in the rear, with the loot in our 

hand. 

And you, makers of laws ! 

Who are true to the gold-bag's cause — 

Who will not interfere — 

To whom commerce alone is dear. 

And who pay any price — 

Child's life, or woman's, or man's — 

For its plans — 

Makers of devil's laws, breakers of God's, 

Open your eyes ! 

See what it means to succeed ! 

Confess once for all that you worship the Ogre 

of Greed. 
And then 
Turn again ! 
For know, there are scorpions' rods 



THE ESCUTCHEON 35 

Of remorse, and dishonour, and shame, 

In the wake of his name. 

Ogre dread ! 

Send him and his slavery back to the dead ! 

The StoRer 

NOW and then a stoker, come up to breathe 
between decks, glances under the canvas 
awning at us as we yawn over our novels 
in the long row of steamer-chairs aligned 
on the leeward side of the upper deck. 

I wonder what he thinks when he sees us. 

Kind, good stoker, why do you not come and 
sit in my chair and make me stoke in your 
stead for a while ? 

How good God is to give us first cabin passages 
through life ! 

And how nice of people to make ships for us 
and provide us with a good table d'-hote and 
comfortable beds and everything ready 
just when it is wanted. 

And how fortunate for us it is that the world's 
hold is full of stokers who ask no questions 
and have no sense of humour ! 

The Escutcheon 

POUNCE on the innocent, Powers-that-be ! 
Live up to your coats-of-arms — 
Vulture or beast of prey — 
Whatever is cruel and harms, 
And loves to torture and slay — 
Your symbol and brand. 



36 CORONAL 

Though the soft He drop from your Hps, on your 

shields we see 
The lust of your heart's desire as it guides your 
. hand. 

But the brutes are brave and will fight 
With the best of their breed ; 
While ye, ye nations, have goodly heed 
To cringe to the men of might 
And harry the weak. 
All your courage of old — 
All the strength that ye used to wreak — 
Ye have lost in your search of the ends of the 
earth for gold. 

But now that ye are combined 

In imperial sway. 

Let your holy alliance find 

An escutcheon new that will fit this ultimate 

day. 
Makers of money and empire, why not assume 
The good old Medici arms of the Golden Balls ? 
Dig them reverently up from the tomb. 
And hang their eloquent sign from your outer 

walls. 
Leave their sins to the beasts — let us answer for 

ours. 
All hail to the arms of the Pawnbroking Powers. 

Coronal 

LO, the peoples, — all of them — 
Form our Planet's diadem, — 
Men and women, hand in hand. 
Circling, linking land to land. 



TO ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI 37 

Like a garland round her head, 
See them, yellow, white and red, — 
Sombre-hued and fair and dun, — 
As she dances round the sun. 

Pale or dusky though they be. 
Yet she flaunts them equally, — 
Proud of all of them, — afraid 
Lest a single blossom fade. 

Flowers, twine in friendship true ! 
Buds be plenty, briars few ! 
So the wreath that now adorns 
Ne'er becomes her crown of thorns. 

Beatus Ille 

HAPPY the man, who, probing what is 
meant 
By the vague gnawing of his discontent, 
Traces it back to discontent with self. 
And then stops cursing his environment. 

To St. Francis of Assisi 

DEAR Francis, did Assisi's burghers frown 
And did the women look askance and 
chide 
Because thou tookest for thy chosen bride 
Lorn Poverty, thrice-shunned of all the town ? 
The hard-earned wealth the ages handed down 
Was it thy pleasure thus to thrust aside ? 
What wonder then that all the world deride 
To see thee wedded in a beggar's gown ? 



38 THE SCHOOL OF RICHES 

Little they recked that from thine emptied hfe 

Giotto and Cimabue would draw the power 

To bring forth Art, nor that thy hymns when 

rife 

Would sow the seed of Dante's'splendid flower. 

Nay, Poverty, I wot that never wife 

Brought to her own true lord such priceless 
dower ! 



The School of Riches 



BLESSED are the poor who know the 
emptiness of riches. 

The poor are no better than the rich. 
J It is the poor in spirit — those who do not desire 
riches (those who have passed beyond 
riches, not those who are yet below them) 
— who are better than the rich.v 

We are all in the same school of the Vanity of 
Riches, and the rich are in the senior class, 
the class of experience, and will perhaps be 
the first to be graduated. 

Some day we shall all take the degree of Con- 
tempt for Riches. 

Blessed are the poor who know without experi- 
ence the vanity of riches, for they shall 
take the degree cum maxima laude. 

II 

Methought I heard God and Satan talking of me 
as once they talked of Job. 



LOOK SHARP 39 

And Satan said : " I am tired of all these 
ancient forms of torture. The wri things of 
the prisoner under the lash weary me. The 
shrieks of the captive in Central Africa as 
he feels the slow inevitable fire make me 
yawn. All these old fashioned sufferings 
have become maddening in their monotony. 
When I was young, how I revelled in these 
joys, but now, alas, those days have passed 
away. What new punishment can I invent 
for this man ? " 

And God said : " What hath he done to deserve 
punishment ? " 

And Satan answered and said : "He prayed 
continually for riches and pleasures and 
consideration, and strove for them above 
all things, and forgot Thee altogether." 

And God said, " Give him wealth and its 
honours and pleasures, and see to it that 
he find no way to escape from them, and 
then open his eyes that he behold what 
manner of things they be." 

And Satan went forth from the presence of God 
exulting as of yore. 



Look Sharp 

LOOK sharp ! thou art one of God's eyes. 
Speak clear, for His word thou art. 
Be His finger, — act strong and wise. 
Love hard, and get into His heart. 



40 BUDDHA 

"Not a Christian" 

SO you condemn him once for all as " not a 
Christian." 
What is your test of a Christian ? 
I call Christians those whom Christ would be 

likely to associate with if He came back to 

earth to-day. 
Do you think He would frequent bishops* 

palaces ? 
Are you sure that they would find Him quite 

orthodox, — in short, your kind of a Chris- 
tian ? 
Where do you think He would preach, at St. 

Paul's or in Hyde Park ? 
Would he explain the doctrine of the Trinity, 

and the efficacy of infant baptism, and the 

use of proper vestments at the Mass ? 
How the poor priests would huddle these things 

out of the way, if they really saw and 

recognized Him ! 
But they would not recognize Him. 
He would talk of Scribes and Pharisees, and 

Chief Priests and Rulers in the good old 

way. 
And how long would you " Christians " listen to 
Him without indignation ? 

Buddha 

PASSIONLESS, contemplative, free from 
desire, 
Beyond love and hate, beyond good and evil, 
forever beyond the pairs of opposites, — 



CAIN 41 

Is this, O Gautama — once so human, so lov- 
able — is this the true goal that you have 
reached ? 

Is there no divine passion, no pure supreme 
desire ? 

May I not choose to dwell in the equilibrium of 
the opposites rather than rise above them ? 

If life and desire are one, must I crave death, 
thus still desiring ? 

Or do we really mean the same thing, and is 
your immeasurable calm a more abundant 
life? 

If you could only have been in Galilee in those 
other days ! 

How you would have loved each other ! 

And what would you have had to learn, and 
what to teach ? 

Religion 

THE childish mistaking of pictures for 
facts, — 
The crass materialization of allegory, — 
The infinite capacity of man for humbugging 

himself, — 
And underneath it all the shadowy outline of 
truth. 

Cain 

NAY, flee not from me. Does this livid 
brand 
Stamped on my brow affright you ? Fear it 

not. 
It marks a sin, perhaps, but yet a sin 



42 CAIN 

That had its root in kindliness of heart, 
Which brought upon my soul, bent Edenward, 
The hatred of my brother Abel's God. 
For with my mother's milk I had sucked in 
Eden's sweet memories, and she told me much 
Of that glad time when all the beasts and birds 
Were, as it were, her brethren — how it was. 
The Master of the garden blessed them all, 
And gave them every herb and every tree 
To be to them for food, and how one day 
She plucked the fairest fruit of all, and how 
The Master drove them forth, Adam and Eve, 
In anger, and how first He slew the beasts 
That looked with trustful pitiful amaze 
At this new monster, Death, and how he bound 
Their bloody skins around her waist and his, 
While both shrank back in horror. From the 

day 
I first could understand that oft-told tale, 
I dreamt of Eden, and I sought to turn 
Even with my baby hands this cursed earth 
Into another garden. And I loved 
To till the soil, and bring my choicest fruits 
And lay them in my mother's lap, and ask 
If these were fair as Eden's golden yield. 
And she would smile, — oh, such a plaintive 

smile, — 
And tell me " Ay," and kiss me, but the tears 
That fell upon my face and her deep sigh 
Said " Nay " more clearly. Abel listened too 
To all these tales, but little did he care 
For Eden and its green luxuriant herbs. 
Rather he loved to hear how the dumb beasts 



CAIN 43 

Came to the slaughter, — how the skins were 

ripped 
From the warm bodies, how the sharpened 

stone 
Pierced the soft flesh, and how the blood gushed 

forth. 

And once upon a time, as with my foot 

I guided through the thick and blackened soil 

The irrigating waters, in the sky 

I saw a smoke ascending, and I smelt 

A burning stench, and heard the bleat of lambs. 

Then ran I toward the place and through the 

trees 
Looked curiously. What was it that I saw ? 
My brother Abel holding in his hands 
A new-born lamb that cried just like a child 
While he bent back its head and cut its throat ! 
And well-nigh all its blood poured out and left 
The trembling body. On a pile of stones 
Crackled a mighty fire, while bones and wool 
And bits of flesh and trickling streams of blood, 
With here and there great splashes, made a 

scene 
That touched mine eyes with madness, and I 

felt,— 
As I beheld those helpless slaughtered lambs, — 
The self-same spirit of blind blood-thirstiness 
That filled their murderer, strike into my soul. 
I stooped and lifted from the ground a stone 
Large as my head and hurled it at the lad 
Before he saw me. It felled him to the earth 
Crushing his back. I saw his red life's blood 



44 CAIN 

Mix with the lamb's upon his legs and arms, 
And then I fled. . . . 

If I had only guessed 
That violence will not yield to violence, — 
That butchery keeps alive the butcher's trade, 
Shedding of blood the murderer's ! Had I known 
That by my very deed I gave assent 
To Abel's sin, and made it permanent. 
Forever taking from myself the right 
Of re-creating Eden ! Had I dreamed, 
(As since that day I often have foreseen 
In visions), how the centuries would drag on 
From cruelty to cruelty, with that sin 
Transmuted into custom, — slaughter-houses 
Revered as temples, lines of butcher-priests 
Pointing mankind to Moloch, conjuring up 
A God who loves to hear his victim's cries, — 
To sniff the smell of blood, and in the end 
To torture his own son, whose followers — 
The wolf-like followers of a lamb — should joy 
In burning saints and prophets at the stake. 
And later yet in preaching war and strife, 
Bloodshed and tyranny against those who work 
For peace and justice ! When I think of this, 
And how one moment of a wider love. 
Embracing killed and killer, in my heart 
Might once have blotted out this tale of guilt 
And changed the current of the stubborn years. 
My punishment is more than I can bear. 

But do not shun me. Do not turn away. 
Be sorry, for this hateful brand proclaims 
A sin that was at worst but half a sin. 



TO NERO 45 

To Nero 

I 

NERO, old dog, I see myself looking out of 
your big eyes. 
We are volcanoes from the same subterranean 

fires, — 
Geysers from the same boiling, invisible sea, — 
Rays from the same eternal sun. 
You recognize me, don't you, brother ? I read 
it in your trustful gaze. 

II 

How many cycles is it since we were all let 

loose like homing pigeons to find our way 

back to God ? 
We each took our own course and all of us, 

except man, have run into some cul-de-sac 

or other. 
Poor hop-toad and earth-worm, what ever 

allured you into such ugly unpromising 

paths ? 
But I can understand the oak tree and golden 

rod, yellow butterfly, the black-winged 

scarlet tanager and the cheerily singing 

wren. 
I almost wonder that I too have not come to a 

standstill in one of these pretty by-ways, 

doomed to mark time forever in exquisite 

aimlessness. 
What an iron will it must have been that kept 

me to the true road so long ! 



46 TO NERO 

III 

Centrifugal, centripetal, — 

A going out, a coming in, — 

A separating, each for himself, a gathering 
together again, each for all, — 

That is the history of life in the universe. 

First the selfish plant, then the animal making 
delicious experiments in mother-love, and 
at last in us, men, scattering life at last 
promising to respond for good and all to 
the converging forces, — 

Yet all of us alive with the one great life, com- 
prehending, as it does, growth and com- 
pletion, out-breath and in-breath, farewell 
and hail. 

The sap rises in yon tall sugar-maple at the 
outer hem of the life universal, — the un- 
conscious life of the world's digestive 
organs, neither knowing nor thinking, its 
nerves rooted low down in the cosmic 
spinal column. 

Your life, old Nero is higher, the reflex-motor 
instinctive life that centres in the lower 
brain of the world, knowing but knowing 
not that it knows, doing but ignorant of 
how it does, — just as we walk unconsci- 
ously and stumble when we put our minds 
to it, and use words unconsciously, which 
seem strange when we repeat them. 

And our man-life is loftier still, our nerves 
communicating with the great upper brain, 
ramifications of the Eternal Will, and of 
that Will we are the offshoots. 



TO NERO 47 

IV 

How the good old mastiff longs to answer me ! 
See it in his eyes and hear it in his whine ! 

Alas, poor Nero, it is too late now. 

In the old plastic days your Adam gave over 
his mouth to gluttony and strife, and rele- 
gated all signs of sympathy to his tail, and 
hence his brain stood still. 

He preferred indulgence by himself to socia- 
bihty, and everlasting lonehness, perpetual 
solitary confinement in self, was his reward. 

V 

O desire, creator, 

Creator reft in twain,— self-desire and yearning 

for others, — 
The self-god triumphing in the beast of prey, — 
The social God in man who is his brother's 

keeper ! 
For the social yearning it was that created man. 
Man longed to commune with his fellows, and 

shaped his mouth to speech and his brain 

to thought. 
It was because be cared more for communion 

than for food or fight, and honoured his 

tongue above his teeth, that he became man. 

VI 

And the social God is still at work creating. 

His spark is kindled in the breast of man, and 
we do not yet know what we shall be. 

We are still on the main highway ; we have 
successfully threaded the labyrinth thus 
far ; we have a future before us. 



48 TO NERO 

Shall we escape the blind alleys ? 

Shall we have nerve to stick to the narrow path, 
turning neither to the right hand nor to the 
left? 

Shall we succumb to the attraction neither of 
gay feathers nor soft music, nor to the long- 
ing to fly in the heavens above nor to 
burrow in the earth beneath, nor to swim 
in the water under the earth ? 

Shall we advance with confident unswerving 
instinct, knowing that the Overman, when 
he comes, will be born of the social yearn- 
ing ? 

VII 

And yet, Nero, I will not boast that I am human 

and a man in your presence, for all life 

must rise together. 
Such epithets are too narrow for me ; they are 

mere party-terms and faction-labels. 
I will have none of them. 
I will be nothing narrower than a neighbour 

and a brother. 
You are a neighbour and brother, and how do 

I know that you are not human and a 

man ? 
I am persuaded that you have a future too. 
We are all arrows shot at a mark at a venture. 
Do you ask what blunderer with misty eye and 

palsied arm sent you thus aimlessly through 

space ? 
Patience ! It was no blunderer, and we shall all 

arrive. 



APRIL 49 



April 



SEE the apple-orchard 
Bathing head and shoulders 
In the dazzling pea-green 
Rising-tide of April ; 
While an ancient pear tree 
In the kitchen garden 
Spreads the rugged outline 
Of its jet-black branches 
Underneath a drifted 
Mass of snowy blossoms. 
Tinted is the herbage 
With unnumbered violets. 
Tiny sky-blue butterflies 
Like uprooted flowrets 
Flirt among the sunbeams. 
Hickory-tips are bursting 
Into clustering parachutes. 
On the white-oak saplings 
Pink and folded leaflets 
Now uncurl their tendrils 
Like the opening iingers 
Of soft new-born babies. 
Listen, from the marshes 
Multitudinous frog notes 
Ringing out metallic 
Like the ghosts of sleigh-bells ; 
While a red-winged blackbird, 
Eager to be mating, 
From a bare twig bugles, 
" 0-kal-ee,— it's April ! " 

B. D 



so SPRING THOUGHTS 

Spring Thoughts 



THE leaves are not out yet upon the moun- 
tain, but the red promise of them 
begins to tinge its grey flank. 

And so my heart flushes with the springtide, 
and the robins and blue-birds come back to 
me also from the South. 

For I am part and parcel of it all. 

There is no feeling in bird or beast or insect, in 
bud or tendril, which has not its counter- 
part in me. 

I am as bold as the bear emerging lean and 
famished from his winter dormitory. 

I tremble at the sound of the crackling branch 
with the squirrel and rabbit, as they prick 
up their ears and listen with ear and eye 
and tail. 

The snake and the toad hop and glide within 
me, though I would fain deny them. 

I am more natural than the nature around me, 
for the wolf and the panther have left these 
woods, but they still have their lair in my 
heart, and no advance of civilisation will 
ever drive them forth from that fastness. 

I sleep and dream with the stolid forest trees, 
lulled by the south-west wind. 

I feel the sap rising in me, and I wake into 
ardent blossoms. 

I struggle for air and sunlight with them all, 

though we look so innocent and peaceful. 
Every note in the scale of creation from heaven 



SPRING THOUGHTS 51 

to hell rouses to vibration some sympa- 
thetic chord within me. 

I cannot escape a single experience of the uni- 
verse, if I would. 

My cowardice is as futile as all cowardice is 
futile. 

I live with all the life I see. 

The spring and summer are mine, and the fall 
and winter will just as surely be mine, and 
after them the following spring-time. 

I must have all — all. 

My lot must be completely bound up with the 
common lot. 

I claim no exclusive privilege. 

I will live with them and I will die with them 
and with them shall I rise from the dead. 

Nature has not slighted me by exempting me 
from any of her laws. 

II 

The willows are signalling with light green 

streamers the arrival of Spring in the 

offing. 
The soft maples have hoisted the red standard 

which in their code has the same meaning. 
Sail in with swelling sails, O ship of life, for the 

ice has long since ebbed out of the harbour. 
Coming and going every year, O ship, bringing 

the living and taking away the dead, tell 

me, where is the other port at the end of 

your annual journey ? 
Do you bring them to life too, and take away 

their dead ? 



52 SPRING THOUGHTS 

On the deep, lonely sea is your cargo somehow 

changed and transformed ? 
I half guess the secret of your voyage. 
Tell me, is it not true that death is only the 

seamy side of birth ? 

Ill 

The pale-green finger-tips of the sombre firs 

point in all directions at the wonders of 

April. 
In the woods the warm days have lured forth 

the tender leaves on the young trees, and 

undergrowth, but the lofty oaks show 

hardly a sign of life as yet. 
A greenish mist of leaves is rising sun-lit from 

the ground, but it reaches only half way 

up their towering trunks. 
New yellow sprouts stand upright on the 

diminutive pines like candles on a Christ- 
mas-tree. 
Each sprout, each needle, each leaf, grows forth 

independently, obeying only the life within. 
O woods, — 

Untamed, unheeding woods, — 
Ungoverned, unlicensed, unpermitted, — 
Asking no one's leave to fulfil your destiny ! 
In vain I peer and search beneath your branches 

for a glimpse of the State. 
Here at least the State is for once well out of 

sight. 
Before your leafy wands the giant Bogey of the 

ages has vanished with all his spectral train 

of rights divine. 



SPRING THOUGHTS 53 

The only divine rights here are those of beech 
and chestnut, — but that I am here too 
with the rights divine of Man. 

I pledge my allegiance with the forest trees. 

Their oath is my oath and their State is my 
State. 

We are the true realists and deal only with 
facts. 

We are not like the sentimentalists in town 
with their big books, pretending that they 
are practical while they are lost in a maze 
of Laws and Policies and Patriotisms and 
Precedents and countless other shadowy 
sentiments duly capitalized. 

We know what they have forgotten, that the 
one ultimate fact is life. 

When the leaves of the oak are ruled by a 
majority rather than by the inner life of 
the tree, then, and not till then, will I 
believe in majorities. 



IV 



Robin, robin, here you are once more. 
Why did you desert us so early last Autumn ? 
There were still plenty enough of seeds and 

insects. 
Why did you not stay with us longer ? 
The robin answers not, but he cocks his head 

as if to say : 
" What makes you too fly away from the old 

and tried to the new and unexplored ? " 



54 SPRING THOUGHTS 

V 

I have looked down upon the earth from afar. 

I have noted its slow and regular respiration, 
the summer rising and falling like the 
bosom of a sleeping child, rolling its green 
flood alternately north and south and ebb- 
ing back again before the advancing snows. 

I have watched the flight of birds up and down 
the throbbing lands as it keeps time with 
the swelling, sinking breath. 

Whence comes the tireless, imperative push, 
push, push, behind it all ? 

I cannot tell you but I feel it in my heart. 

I am like the bud ; I am conscious of a touch 
of mysterious life at the very centre of me 
that sets all the rest a-bursting. 

Push, push, push, — the old hardened envelopes 
of custom and habit on the outside which 
have so long restrained me yield at last 
and fall withering to the ground. 

The old kernel swells outward and in turn falls 
off likewise. 

And yet forever streams into the centre a 
steady flow of life, welling up from the 
infinite source that fills the bird and flower. 

Push, push, push. 

As the word of the Lord came to Abram, as it 
came to Israel and Moses, as it comes year 
after year to the robin, so also it comes to 
me, saying, 

" Get thee out of thy country and from thy 
kindred and from thy father's house, unto 
a land that I will show thee." 



SPRING THOUGHTS 55 

VI 

May is almost over and the long rows of locusts 
on the winding avenue are pale with blos- 
soms, which are now beginning to fall like 
snow on the carriage-way. 

The air is heavy with their perfume and the 
full clusters buzz with innumerable insects. 

It is prayer-meeting night and the church-bells 
are ringing their beautiful call once again 
from the village. 

I think of the sleepy, uncomfortable congrega- 
tion, only quarter filling the chapel, — of 
the general funereal pitch of the service, — 
of the atmosphere of dismal duty. 

The hum of the bees is as fresh as it was in 
Eden ; — why then has the message of the 
bells lost its freshness ? 

The locust-blooms are as new-inspired to-day 
as they were on the third day of Creation. 

Why is it that the beautiful bells mean less every 



year ? 



VII 



I see a dead beetle in the road and the ants are 
devouring it with great haste. 

I wonder what enemy cut short its life. 

With all my fellow-feeling for this Spring- 
world, surely there is something exotic in 
my soul, and it did not all grow up from 
this hard-hearted soil. 

Its tap-root sucks up its compassion from some 
warmer, softer loam, and something 



S6 SPRING THOUGHTS 

foreign to this inter-struggling world has 
taught it to be less pitiless. 

Poor beetle, whose voice is it that the busy 
voracious ants obey ? 

Wonderful little inlet into which the ocean of 
life once surged, now left high and dry but 
still bearing the shape into which the great 
water fashioned you ! 

How the persistent waves of the sea of life con- 
tinually assault the shores of matter, 
working their way into it at every nook 
and cranny, and then running inevitably 
out, leaving the beach strewn with empty 
shells like this poor beetle-case ! 

But the sea is still full of water and not a drop 
that was here but is there, rising and 
falling with the living tide. 

VIII 

Coffined too long in my body, I spring forth at 

last unaccountably free. 
I make my choice to live outside, even on the 

advancing outskirts of my subtle influence. 
All these years I have been content to go to the 

bottom like a stone and lie at rest in the 

soft mud. 
Now I choose to spread out forever on the sur- 
face hke the widening undulating circles. 
I did not know that I could walk on the water, 

— but I can. 
I tried it at first fearsomely as if it were thin 

black ice which would give way with my 

weight, — but it bears. 



SPRING THOUGHTS 57 

Oh, the freedom of it, rising thus as it were 
from the dead, — 

Forsaking lonehness, ambition and pride, — 

Swelhng out into fresh air, buoyancy, health 
and love, — 

Finding no frontier anywhere, — 

Sensible of infinite, wasteful regions of elbow- 
room, — 

Breathing in space and leaving it behind, — 

The universe passing through me as the ocean 
passes through the gills of a fish. 

IX 

I leave my metropolis on all the railways at 
once with a free pass which no one need 
be ashamed of in my pocket. 

My soul leaps forth north, south, east, west by 
every quivering wire. 

Before long I shall hold the whole world in a 
net. 

My nerves are the central office of a great tele- 
phone company. 

In every town and hamlet there will be a 
branch office and an operator to see and 
hear from me, responsive to my every 
message. 

It will be " hello, hello " to all the world with 
the stars and planets thrown in, but there 
will be no " good-bye." 

I shall speak to them all at once and they will 
speak to me all at once, but there will be 
no confusion. 



58 SPRING THOUGHTS 



Now I am free with the ultimate freedom of all 
things. 

For the first time I am at large and find myself 
in my true element. 

I was meant to fly ; I was half conscious of it 
even when I lay in the befouled nest. 

I know now how the fledgeling feels, when the 
mother-bird hides all day in the sugar- 
maple and peeps out to see if he will dare 
to follow. 

He is very hungry, he chirps piteously, he does 
not know what has become of his hundred 
meals a day and of the familiar warmth 
which was as a part of himself. 

He listens in vain for the well-known cluck 
which means " Here's a worm for you." 

When at length he is well-nigh desperate, some- 
thing strange moves within him for it is 
his Spring-time. 

He hops out of the nest, he knows not why ; he 
flutters his wings, he has faith, he flies, he 
is born again. 

Oh, life, life, that other existence in the old 
nest was not life. 

I am delirious with new-found joy. 

O mother-bird, over there in the thick of the 
maple-tree, are you not as happy as I am ? 

XI 

The creative movement is ecstasy. 

You cannot have creation without ecstasy. 



IN THE GARDEN 59 

Rose-bud red and robin-egg blue and rosy 
blue-eyed baby all tell the same story of 
ecstasy. 

All life is conceived in ecstasy. 

Fatherhood and motherhood are ecstasy. 

God, the Father-Mother-Creator, is ecstasy. 

And the return to God is ecstasy. 



Worship 

BOW before God in prone humility, 
Till thou remember that He lives in 
thee ; 
Then lift thy head superb among the free. 



In the Garden 

I SPIED beside the garden bed 
A tiny lass of ours, . 
Who stopped and bent her sunny head 
Above the red June flowers. 

Pushing the leaves and thorns apart 

She singled out a rose. 
And in its inmost crimson heart, 

Enraptured, plunged her nose. 

" O dear, dear rose, come, tell me true,- 
Come, tell me true," said she, 

" If I smell just as sweet to you 
As you smell sweet to me ! " ^-^ 



6o WINE OF ETERNITY 

Wine of Eternity 

GOD took a vial from its place, 
His throne a span beyond, 
And spilled into a chalice-glass 

Its drops of diamond, 
Which sparkled in the light of His face 
Like brilliants of Golcond. 

These be the waters of To-day, 

Limpid and live and clear. 
He put the empty vial away. 

And chose another near, 
Whose liquor was a yellow-grey, 

Amber and dead and sere. 

Drawn from the Past's dull stagnant lake, 
This draught He poured likewise. 

To watch the crystal wax opaque 
Brought brine into mine eyes. 

Like Asiel, when he spied the snake 
Glide into Paradise. 

Now still another addeth He — 

A vial with darkness kissed, 
Like fluid-night — the Time-to-be — 

Of jet and amethyst — 
And now He stirreth all the three 

Into a purple mist. 

Then in a tall translucent um 

Seraphs decant the bowl. 
Like wine upon the lees, to turn 



YESTERDAY 6i 

The vintage of the soul, 
And as they pour, the Hquids chum 
And seethe and heave and roll. 

They set it on a step below — 

This urn of mystery — 
And on it write as angels do, 

" Wine of Eternity," 
So that the tiniest cherubs know 

What dangerous drink it be. 

Ah, will it turn to amber pale, 

A heartsick monochrome ? 
Or will the amethyst entail 

A violaceous doom ? 
Nay, crystal Now, prevail, prevail. 

And clarify the gloom ! 

Yesterday 

TO-DAY and To-morrow will change, but 
Yesterday changes never. 
To-day and To-morrow die, but Yesterday lives 
forever. 

And little they love each other, this trinity of 

the ages, 
And frightful is the war which each with the 

other wages. 

To-day pursues To-morrow through every kind 

of weather, 
With Yesterday at his heels, who swallows them 

both together. 



62 MOODS 

To-day is ever thin, and To-morrow grows 

thinner and thinner. 
But Yesterday waxes fat with his one eternal 

dinner. 

Though time seems long indeed and the uni- 
verse stout and staunch, 

Will Yesterday gulf it all in his huge omnivor- 
ous paunch ? 



Moods 



THERE is nothing but moods. 
Love underlies creation and love is a 
mood. 
Thought shares the burden with love, and 
thought springs from axiom and premiss, 
and axiom and premiss are moods. 
Even mathematics rests on the number One, 
and One, the idea of unity, is a mood, 
which has nothing in nature to answer to 
it, for all things are complex and compound. 
It is moods then that bear the universe on their 

back. 
There is nothing but moods. 

II 

I am tired of thinking. 

All things are true and so are their opposites. 
I believe every philosophy, but not that it 
contains all. 



MOODS 63 

I adopt all religions, while I remain the uni- 
versal heretic. 

I agree with all men, but I see the other side 
which they do not see. 

I sympathise with every fad and also with the 
blind hater of fads. 

But what a weary vacuity this breadth of mine 
is! 

I could find it in me to envy the chipmunk in 
yon narrow crack in the locust tree, with 
just room enough to turn a somersault and 
pop his head out before his tail is fairly in, 
and with no object in life but nuts and 
birds' eggs. 

O chipmunk, what is the wisdom of the worlds 
compared with yours ? 

What need have you of the human philosopher 
hugging his favourite horn of the eternal 
dilemma ? 

Surely you are the prince of philosophers, 
cracking your history nut to a purpose 
while I split my head in vain. 



Ill 

The world-riddle is heavy upon me to-night. 
O Sphinx, why do you stop me on the road and 

let the others pass by ? 
Why do you mock my impotent brain and tear 

my fevered heart asunder ? 
How often I have spent the whole evening over 

some idle mechanical puzzle, — 



64 MOODS 

Cursing my stupidity for not being able to solve 

it- 
Cursing my infatuation for not being able to 

give it up, — 
Stretched and racked upon the horrible little 

instrument of torture. 
This is life. 
The sphinx himself can furnish no formula by 

way of solution. 
Perhaps if I grow into him and he into me, I 

may feel at last the answer of peace at the 

roots of my being. 
But meanwhile would that I could throw away 

the toy, put out the lamp, and go to bed ! 



IV 

A plump little phebe-bird is perched on the 
lowest branch of the pear tree, with her 
head cocked on one side, watching the 
waving sea of grass for her prey. 

Ever and anon she darts down and comes back 
in an instant to the same twig with a moth, 
caught on the wing, in her bill. 

A great dragon-fly sails slowly by, and the tiny 
bird makes a dash for it, but, thinking 
better of it, she hovers in the air a few 
inches from the insect, following its flight. 

Then she turns disconcerted and flies back to 
her post, while the dragon-fly sails proudly 
on. 

I was not as wise as the phebe-bird. 



MOODS 65 

When I saw the universe buzzing by, I pounced 
upon it and we are still grappling with each 
other. 



V 

I lie in bed in the morning, just awake enough 
to be thankful that it is Sunday and that 
breakfast is to be an hour later than usual, 
but still I have a feeling that it must be 
time to get up. 

I take my watch from the chair by the bedside 
and look at it. 

But no. I have not really moved. I was 
dreaming and I saw the dial through 
closed eyelids. 

Can I ever make up my mind to get out of bed ? 

No ; surely never. 

But all of a sudden I find myself throwing back 
the covers and sitting up, and now the 
hard-wood floor near the rug feels smooth 
and cold to my feet as I seek my slippers. 

What was it that at last drove me out of bed ? 

Who fixed the moment of my rising and made 
me doubt whether I am man or automa- 
ton ? 

VI 

I caught an unexpected sidelong glimpse of my 
right foot and ankle as I got out of my tub 
this morning, and it startled me as if I had 
met a faun or centaur in the woods. 

How does it happen, — strange, inexplicable 
B. E 



66 MOODS 

animals that we are, — that we ever grow 

accustomed to the sight of each other ? 
We are creatures as extraordinary as the 

grotesque shapes in the sea or under the 

flat stones in the pasture. 
How natural and inevitable in comparison is an 

oak or a chestnut-tree. 
If the blind man of Bethsaida had only seen 

correctly ! 
If men were only more like trees walking ! 
The trees are so clean. 
They never spit nor sweat. 
They exude nothing less savoury than aromatic 

odours, and they make the air sweet to 

leeward. 
Cut them open an5rwhere and they have no 

ghastly secrets to reveal. 
Their death is full of dignity and there is no- 
thing revolting in their decay. 
While men befoul the world, it is they that are 

forever cleansing it. 
I think that in heaven men will be more like 

the forest trees. 
And if our animal part is weird, that part of us 

which is not animal is still weirder. 
We are afraid of ghosts, and we are ghosts our- 
selves. 
There can be nothing more uncanny than the 

crowd on Broadway. 
It is as fantastic and gruesome as the wind-swept 

clouds of shades in Hades. 
It is enough to make your hair stand on end 

and your voice stick in your throat. 



MOODS 67 

If we were once to open our eyes, we should be 

frightened out of our wits at the sight of 

our fellow-gobhns. 
I am surprised at my courage in being wilhng 

to remain in a room with you on a dark 

night. 

VII 

I met a man yesterday whom I had not seen or 
thought of for thirty years, and the appal- 
ling fact struck me that during all these 
weary months he had never for a moment 
been able to escape from himself. 

What a frightful thing it is, when you come to 
think of it, to be imprisoned for life in 
yourself, and even in sleep to dog your own 
footsteps liks a shadow. 

How is it that we pray for an eternity of this 
same monotony, and do not long, when we 
rest from our labours, to rest also from 
ourselves ? 

VIII 

There is no past and there is no future, for who 

ever entered into either of those illusory 

realms ? 
There is only a now. 
^Be not anxious for the morrow for there is no 

morrow. 
Live in and for to-day, for all life is to-day, and 

if your to-day is right, all is well for ever.''' 



68 MOODS 

IX 

Floating, slowly floating through the air, — 
Gliding, now swiftly, over vast surfaces but 

never touching them, — 
Walking the waves and finding them soft and 

pleasant to the feet, but preferring to 

skim over them as the swallow skims, — 
I could swear that this is my natural way of 

locomotion. 
How often I dream of it and come back to my 

legs as to unfamiliar, awkward crutches ! 
What is our swimming and diving, our coasting 

and skating, our riding and cycling and 

motoring and dancing, but a vain effort 

to realize this dream ? 

X 

I am not really here. 

I am really up there somewhere. 

I look at myself with surprise to see myself 

talking so glibly. 
It is after dinner and we are sipping coffee in 

the drawing-room. 
The company are gossiping idly and I am 

speaking to my neighbour. 
I talk like the rest of them, but we are unUke, 

for I at least feel that I am not all here. 
I am up there somewhere, and my body with 

its brain is my tool, which I gaze upon 

and criticise. 
There is that within me, my friends, that you 

dream not of. 



MOODS 69 

There is more in life than coffee and cigarettes 
and hqueurs, if you will only stop chatter- 
ing long enough to let it speak for itself. 

XI 

"^We are all marionettes, and I tire sometimes 

of the play. 
The comedy of it does not amuse me, and its 

tragedy is too tragic. 
I cannot follow the plot for its intricacy. - 
The seats are uncomfortable to painfulness, 

and there is no room for my cramped 

knees and elbows. 
The air is close and stifling and the garish light 

sears my eyes. 
I long for the last scene when we shall drop 

the masques of time and space and find 

behind them — just you and me ! 

XII 

Yet there is fascination too in the world as it is. 
How I love the slap-dash, slam-bang of the 

devil's gypsy music ! 
Oh, to skim along without a soul, to dance 

madly, to let yourself go, — 
To slash yourself with knives, to set your teeth 

and grasp the blades exultingly until 

they cut to the finger-bones, — 
To be completely inebriated with the rhythm 

of passing things ! 
But here come those wretched familiar scruples 

again ! 



70 MOODS 

What pleasure do you take in making my life 
miserable ? 

Just as I let myself out at a full run and con- 
fidently brace myself for the leap, I am 
sure to catch a glimpse of your sour dis- 
approving faces ; my energy and resolu- 
tion melt within me, my knees turn to 
water and I halt in confusion. 

I am forever rebelling against you, and then 
following you slavishly wherever you 
lead. 

And yet I do not half believe in your paradise. 

You promise me a quiet conscience and you 
do not for a moment give it to me. 

I begin to doubt if it lies in your direction. 

I could envy the thick-skinned unscrupulous 
men who ride rough-shod whither they 
will, and no more think of lying awake 
o' nights than earthquakes or thunder- 
storms. 

I will not be a cowardly, blameless man. There 
you have my declaration of independence. 

And yet, — and yet, — 

What is that beyond that I hear ? 

The calm compelling chords of a new celestial 
harmony. 

The stars of music shining down compassionate 
upon the blazing crackling, crashing, 
conflagration of sound. 

The immortal sisters, heaven and hell, recog- 
nising each other, and only differing as 
the one is more mature and fairer and 
wiser. 



MOODS 71 

XIII 

I hear my conscience speak.* 

Alas, that I should hear it, for, just as to hear 
my heart beat, it argues disorder and 
disease. 

Why did I arrive before the end of the morbid 
centuries ? 

V^'ho condemned me to be a degenerate, con- 
scientious man ? 

Who made me unfit to be free from myself, — 
at once a slave and a tyrant ? 

It will all pass away. 

Like the hermit-cell, the hair shirt, the flagel- 
lation, it will pass. 

When brotherhood comes, when full com- 
munion comes, it will already have passed. 

XIV 

Posterity, dear children, we are facing all this 
perplexity and torment of spirit for you, — 

Unravelling the loose ends of the mystery for 
you,— 

Discovering God, finding somethmg better 
than creed and decalogue for you. 

The growing-pains of the world have fallen 
to us, but our joy will be in your full 
growth and vigour. 

The prisoner in his cell thinks most of free- 
dom ; — 

* These lines were suggested by an article in the 
American Journal of Sociology for May, 1898, by 
Professor E. A. Ross. 



72 IN THE SADDLE 

The starving man dreams ever of choicest 

meats ; — 
And so my soul, walking alone and lonely, 

ceaselessly conjures up fond pictures of 

your reunited world, 
Where conscience will be lost in rapture and 

duty merged in love. 



The Seers 

LIKE mountain peaks, the morning tints 
with gold 
The loftiest brows in every land. 

Look in those eyes of promise, and behold 
The day at hand. 



In the Saddle 

MOUNTED on Ahmar, flying at a mad 
run over the desert, — 

The infinite deep blue sea on the left bound- 
ing the infinite expanse of ruddy grey 
sand, and from it the strong north wind 
blowing under the infinite pale blue sky. 

It is a trinity of infinities, and we feel infinite 
too, my stallion and I. 

His body heaves and falls between my legs 
like a great bellows that I am working 
and squeezing, and his girth creaks and 
creaks. 



IN THE SADDLE 73 

I wave my whip in the air, — he sees it from 
the corner of his red off-eye, but it has no 
effect on him, for he is always straining 
every nerve with outstretched sweating 
neck and wild mane. 

I scarcely seem to move in the saddle. 

How we enjoy it ! I sing aloud in glee. 

Before we left the palm-groves, — the tall bend- 
ing palms and the short palms buried 
up to their necks in the sand, — I could 
hardly hold him, and he would bolt while 
we were still dangerously entangled 
among the trunks. 

At the well on the edge of the desert the Arab 
girls saw us coming, and they caught up 
their water-jars and scurried away, as I 
laughed at them and shouted, " Riglak, 
ya bint ! " 

Now we see nothing human except the white 
sunlit minaret by the sea. 

How we enjoy it ! 

Alexander rode here, and Caesar, and Napoleon. 

Here Augustus and Antony fought for the world. 

Nelson drove France from the seas off 
the shore over there. 

But all that is trivial ; the one important fact 
is that here we are, man and mount, 
merged and lost in the wind. 

Heaven must be something like this, — and so 
must hell, — 

And between the two there is nothing quite 
worth while. 



74 ON THE SUEZ CANAL 

On the Suez Canal 

A STARRY night on the Suez Canal ! 
I am standing on the forward deck of 
a tramp steamer, talking with the voluble 
young French employee of the canal com- 
pany who manages the searchlight. 

I am the only passenger on board, and all the 
ship's officers and crew, not on duty, are 
at supper. 

We two are in the shadow behind the great box 
which belches forth radiance before us. 

The bowsprit and white rail and tarred ropes 
stand out with unnatural distinctness in 
the glare. 

Beyond them the widening streak of brilliance 
silvers the everlasting desert, threaded by 
the straight black waterway. 

We steam slowly, ponderously southward, and 
our yawning monster of light devours ever 
new stretches of sand, and casts the 
remnants behind him in the dark. 

Now he unearths a miniature Bedouin en- 
campment on the right — two tents and as 
many camels. 

One of the beasts, tethered, browses on tufts 
of desert herbage like a live pyramid. 

The other sleeps recumbent in the sand like a 
pyramid fallen in ruins. 

The lord of the tents comes out into the night 
to look at us, and his outline has all the 
dignity of an Abraham or a Moses. 

" How strange it is," I say dreamily to my 



ON THE SUEZ CANAL 75 

companion, " how strange it is to think 
that across this very wilderness, looking 
just as it does to-night, the children of 
Israel once journeyed ! " 

" Yes," said he, " and yon Arab is nearer to 
Moses than we are to him." 

" Ah, I am not so sure of that," I say to 
myself, while he busies himself with his 
wires. 

Are we really so unlike Moses, the man who 
with his mysterious searchlight, his pillar 
of fire by night, led forth into the desert 
to find the Promised Land ? 

(He had his pillar of cloud by day too, just 
such a one as our funnel poured out into 
the sunlight this afternoon.) 

Would he acknowledge any kinship to him- 
self, except in externals, in the changeless 
contented Bedouin ? 

What better representative of our modern 
world could there be than this steamer of 
ours, traversing the waste of the ages with 
its metallic tread, carrying its stokers and 
feasters in its belly, with only my friend 
and me visible beneath the sky to do duty 
as the poet and reformer ? 

There they are, ever at the prow with their 
electric light, searching the same desert 
for the same elusive Promised Land, and 
ready to signal back on the very clouds of 
heaven to the loitering hosts in their wake 
such discoveries as may reward their 
vigils. 



76 CHRISTMAS 

Ah, it is often chilly, hungry work, and now 
and again they would fain go below and 
sup with the rest, or even help to shovel 
coal into the glowing furnace. 

They ask with Moses : " Who are we that we 
should bring forth the children of Israel 
out of Egypt ? " 

They would gladly encamp in idleness forever 
with the eternal Arab under the eternal 
stars. 

But the God of Moses is still in the desert, and 
the cry of his children still comes to him, 
and still he chooses his unwilling servants 
to renew the endless journey to the land 
of milk and honey, forever receding before 
their searchlight in the distance. 



Christmas 

ON the first of the lengthening days. 
When the years' early morn 
Gives the first summer pledge with its rays, 
He is born. 

Light has conquered the Dark. Did we fear 

As the days shrank and paled 
In the trough of the night of the year. 

Light had failed ? 



CHRISTMAS 77 

And the night's irresistible powers, — 

As the Hght ebbed away, — 
How they swallowed the minutes and hours, 

Day by day ! 

To the depths of the valley of gloom 

Had the sun to descend. 
But to-day, lo ! the cycle of doom 

Has an end ! 

For the promise of summer reflects 

On the brows of the sky 
All the glory creation expects 

By and bye. 

Let the winter be cruel and grey ! 

We care little who know 
That our Christmas hails Easter to-day 

O'er the snow : 

And that Easter brings summer and heat 

And the sunlight of love. 
And the kingdom of heaven complete 

From above. 

Christmas Day with its greetings and song 

And its brotherly cheer 
Is the earnest of days which ere long 

Will be here. 

And the Child whom the manger reveals 

'Twixt the sheep and the kine 
Is the earnest of Manhood that feels 

The Divine. 



78 JUDGE NOT 

Judge Not 



WHY do I punish ? 
I may say that I do it to balance the 
misdeed, to reform the misdoer, or to 
improve the world. 
I may say all this, — but why do I punish ? 
I punish because I crave punishment as I 

crave tobacco or whiskey. 
When I learn to crave something better, I 
shall cease to punish. 

II 

I judge you ? 

Who made me to be a judge over you ? 

What do I know about you ? 

What do I know about myself ? 

I sometimes think that I condemn myself on 

inadequate evidence. 
Is not the fact of being born a man or a woman 

an all-sufficient extenuating circumstance ? 

Ill 

Do not think that I am judging you ; I am 
judging myself. 

I know you only as a reflection of myself.'' 

All your worst faults are flourishing in my soul, 
and it is only there that I can know them 
and grapple with them. 

I am merely using you as a lay-figure to repre- 
sent myself. 



TOWN PICTURES 79 

I cannot effectually invade your country. 
I can only invite you to inaugurate a campaign 
there on your own account. 

IV 

My punishment is what I am. 

Chains, prisons, solitary cells, are but faint 

shadows of it. 
And I am also my own reward ; 
For a strain of heaven too has somehow worked 

itself into my substance. 
I am the product of my own good and evil. 
VWhy should I judge and punish you, when we 

must all judge and punish ourselves ? / 



Town Pictures 

I 

I HAVE travelled many ways to find the real 
centre of things human, the point to 
which mankind converges and from 
which it depends. 
Here on Manhattan Island I think of it as 
lying somewhere to the east in Europe, 
but I have looked for it there in vain. 
I could not put my hand on it in London or 

Paris or Rome or Stamboul. 
These cities were too far north or south or east 
or west, and yet in passing from one to 
the other I never felt myself at the true 



8o TOWN PICTURES 

centre of gravity in the intermediate fields 
and villages. 

How much in earnest we all seem to be on the 
express train ! 

Surely we are a people with an object in life, 
if any there be. 

We pity the poor town and country folk whom 
we see hopelessly adrift along the way as 
we rush to the great capital. 

Now we are approaching the terminus. 

There is bustle and confusion as we don our 
overcoats and gather shawlstraps and hat- 
boxes. 

Then the train stops short, and we sally forth 
in every direction ; — and that is all ! 

There is nothing but aimlessness and restless- 
ness in the metropolis, and we cannot thus 
extricate ourselves from the provinces. 

And it is really so easy, no matter what out- 
of-the-way corner you inhabit. 

You have but one discovery to make. 

Learn that your back door opens on eternity, 
and there you are in the very centre of 

i things. 

•'The man who has eternity in his garden need 
not worry about the street on which his 
house fronts. • 

II 

Here I am in the station lunchroom, standing 
at the counter and eating what supper I 
may while our locomotive is drinking at 
the pump. 



TOWN PICTURES 8i 

I have my eye on the thickset, greybearded 
conductor perched on a stool opposite me, 
for I know that I am safe so long as he 
does not move. 

In his blue cloth and brass buttons, and with 
the carnation in his buttonhole, he is as 
dignified as an admiral, and far more useful. 

He is talking with the girl who waits on him, 
but there is a quiet reserve and sense of 
strength beneath the surface which show 
that he feels the panting of his iron charge 
outside. 

He and the girl are on an easy footing, as befit 
co-operators in the great work of trans- 
portation. 

I like the pride and comradeship of these rail- 
way people. 

Even the women who were washing car-win- 
dows at the Grand Central Station this 
afternoon seemed conscious of a joint 
interest in the whole line and of the fact 
that these were no common panes of glass. 

The newsboy on the way up stalked through 
the train as if it was his quarterdeck, and 
he was acknowledged by the conductor 
and brakemen as a man of consideration. 

Their looks seemed to say. We are members 
one of another. 

A whistle sounds from the north. " There's 
' Number Three,' " whispers to her neigh- 
bour the aproned damsel who presides over 
my repast — and she quietly glides to the 
door. 



82 TOWN PICTURES 

I follow her, fearing unreasonably that my 
portmanteau may somehow go off without 
me. 

I am just in time to see the dazzling headlight 
of the Western Express burst forth from 
the cutting with a thundering roar like a 
mad monster in a nightmare. 

The bell on the engine rings out deafeningly, 
the platform fairly shakes, and the rush of 
wind almost carries away my hat. 

There is a glimpse of the glowing faces of the 
engineer and the fireman at their volcanic 
hearth. 

The heavy mail cars and then the unwieldy 
sleepers, giving gleams of electric light and 
upholstery, plunge by us into the dark- 
ness. 

On the last platform I see a trainman waving 
his handkerchief at me above the blood- 
shot bull's eye lamp in the rear. 

But no, it is for the girl, whom I had well nigh 
forgotten. 

She waves her napkin and looks smiling 
after the apparition until it is swallowed 
up in the night like a stone in a black 
pool. 

Now she is again in her place at the counter. 

In a half minute she has contributed her share 
of sentiment to " Number Three " and 
to the great iron system of which it forms 
a part. 

She has helped knit together the numerous 
band of the comrades of the road. 



TOWN PICTURES 83 

What would not Wagner have given could he 
have chained this dragon, " Number 
Three," with its rush and roar and romance 
to his art. 

It is our turn now to dash along, ponderous 
and rumbling, to the north. 

The conductor has descended from his pinnacle 
and I follow him out to the train. 

I am proud to be borne on my way by these 
railway workers. 

As I sit in my seat, looking out at the shadows 
flying by, I wonder why we cannot run 
our world as they do theirs. 

We only need the same esprit de corps, which, 
when exalted and extended, we call re- 
ligion. 

Is our orbit less worthy of it than the steel rails 
of the Central Line ? 



Ill 

Is there anything on earth more forbidding 
than a Court House ? 

Is there a more hopeless sight than a criminal 
court in session ? 

Come up the dirty, clammy steps with me. 

Ten thousand sorrows have stained the walls 
and floor, and the air is heavy with the 
sighs of a century. 

Why is it that men's laws when they assert 
themselves make all things hideous ? 

We push through the green-baize doors be- 
tween the policemen who stand on guard. 



84 TOWN PICTURES 

The attendant opens the gate in the raihng 
and we sit down among the members of 
the bar. 

The prisoners are huddled together in a pen 
in the corner. 

We can only see them as they are brought out 
handcuffed one by one to plead. 

Some — a very few — have ill-shapen heads from 
which little good can be expected. 

They need the moulding influence of mothers 
and sisters and wives, or of guardians 
who may tenderly fill their places. 

We, in our wisdom, lock them up rather for 
years, and then turn them loose again, 
far more dangerous and miserable than 
before. 

The other prisoners are for the most part just 
hke you and me. 

Somehow I like their looks much better than 
those of their gaolers and prosecutors. 
\/ All that our punishing does for them is to de- 
grade them. 

It does not, as it should, expiate and annul 
their crime. 

On the contrary, we despise them, not for their 
faults, but for the penalty we inflict. ^^ 

We reserve our deepest contempt, not for the 
thief, but for the gaol-bird, — not for the 
contaminated soul, but for the striped 
clothes we put on the body. 

The court-officers are now hustling the wretched 
men and women one after another up to 
the bar as their names are called. 



TOWN PICTURES 85 

They pass the hmp human merchandise along 
Hke machines. 

The monotonous clerk reads off the indictments 
like a machine. 

The bored, impassive judge presides over it all 
like a machine. 

For none of them are these hunted, frightened 
creatures real human beings. 

There is no more thought of brotherhood in 
the Court than there is in the wheels and 
cogs of a factory. 

It is a dead, relentless mill. 

The grindstones are made of human flesh un- 
naturally petrified, and it is against nature 
that they are grinding human flesh be- 
tween them. 

The judge and the lawyers and deputies 
and policemen are nothing but bolts 
and rivets and bars, — but iron and 
flint. 
'They are no longer men ; they have abdicated 
their humanity and are now merely so 
much machinery. 

How sure His Honour is as he sits there that 
he will enter into the kingdom of heaven 
before these vulgar transgressors ! 

I am not so sure. 
/The greatest crime a man can commit is to 
make a machine of himself. / 

A machine is lower than a brute, and to sink 
to that level is worse than robbery or 
murder. 

It is worse because it is less human. 



86 TOWN PICTURES 

I think I comprehend now why I had such an 
aversion for the hard faces of these legal 
people. 

A trial has begun at last. 

They are swearing a detective as witness. 

Every one knows that his trade and character 
are much lower than the prisoner's at the 
bar, but here he is recognised as a brother- 
administrator of justice and is esteemed 
accordingly. 

A police-officer follows him and kisses the 
greasy Bible. 

They are all aware that a policeman will swear 
to anything, though a man hang for it, 
and yet here his word passes for gospel 
truth. 

It is the business of mills to grind and the faces 
of the poor have always been ground ; 
shall we blame the undiscriminating grind- 
stones ? 

In France they hang up a picture of Christ-on- 
the-Cross over the bench in every court- 
room. 

That murder was the deed of a court of law, — 
of two courts in fact. 

What a gallery we could make of the sad work 
of similar mills of justice ! 

There I seem to see hanging on the dingy wall 
the faces of Socrates and Paul, of Savon- 
arola and More, of Huss and Galileo, of 
Bameveldt and Sidney and John Brown. 

If the judge could see and understand them, 
he would feel less virtuous and superior. 



TOWN PICTURES 87 

How many judges are only remembered now 
on account of the felons whom they des- 
pised ! 

Ah, your Honour does not know what dirty 
work this is at its best ! 

You are the partner of the informer and execu- 
tioner and not a whit more respectable 
than they are. 

Let us leave the fetid, accursed place. 

At the door a thin, timid young woman, weary 
and wan, a black shawl thrown over her 
head, is asking a policeman where she can 
find her husband. 

She speaks English badly and holds up a soiled 
piece of crumpled paper which bears his 
name. 

He has been arrested, she says, and all day 
long she has sought him in vain, wander- 
ing from court to court. 

The man does not half listen to her. 

How should a machine hear ? 

He brushes her away. 

She turns to another and another, but not one 
of them will give her his attention. 

They are all under the spell of machine-made 
justice which knows neither mercy nor 
humanity. 

Cry on, poor child, in the foul dark corner of 
the corridor under the feeble gas-jet. 

If only you could get at the prisoners in the 
pen and ask them your question, they 
might perhaps hear you, and answer you, 
and take some interest in you, for they are 



88 TOWN PICTURES 

only unhappy human sinners and have 
not yet been transformed into machines. 
But here there is no hope for you. 
Cry on, poor child ! 



IV 

I know you are not telling the truth. 

You have no starving wife and children, and 

you do not want a ticket to Boston to 

enable you to find work. 
What you wish for is another glass of whiskey. 
You are not only lying but lying most unskil- 

fully. 
And yet I believe in you, though I do not believe 

you. 
If I did not believe in you, I should lose faith 

in the Universe. 
Underneath all this falsehood there is some- 
thing firm and true that I will swear by. 
It is well that I should assure you of it, for you 

may not know it. 
Here is your dollar ; spend it as you will ; but 

remember that there is one who trusts you. 



V 

Riding down the Bowery on an electric car, I 
see on the right a drayman, heavy, set in 
his ways, trying perversely to drive across 
the street with his load before we reach 
him. 



TOWN PICTURES 89 

Our motor-man sees him too, and might let him 
pass by yielding his rights a little, but he 
only pushes on the faster. 

The drayman is forced to pull his team hastily 
to one side, and the car strikes the nose of 
the inoffensive near horse. 

The driver scowls and mutters low, ineffectual 
curses. 

The motor-man looks back with a sneer of 
exultation. 

All hell has been loose in the Bowery this morn- 
ing. 

VI 

When I skim over the literary journals one 
after another in the reading-room, 

How they cloy and pall upon me, like a diet of 
sweets ! 

Words, words, words ! — 

The sickening idea of mere unrelated litera- 
ture, — 

The disgustingness of words as the main end of 
life,— 

x^s if words should be aught but the foot-notes 
of life, — 

The notes in small letters and the life itself 
writ out in large, — 

Such are the thoughts that I think in the 
reading-room. 

While I hear the heavy carts thunder along 
towards Broadway, shaking the very 
walls of the building. 



90 TOWN PICTURES 

VII 

The bustling, noisy street, in the foreground — 

drays coming and going, electric cars 

flying by and ringing their warning bell ; 
Foot-passengers hastening their steps, each 

intent on his own errand ; 
Round the corner you see the great primary 

school. 
The two low doors, one at each end of the 

facade, are opening, and now two streams 

begin to flow out as from a tapped reservoir. 
One stream is of frolicking, shouting small boys, 

the other of chattering little girls. 
Each of the twin streams splits in two, and the 

two halves which flow our way mingle 

their waters. 
Boys and girls, red hoods and torn brown caps, 

bags of books and lunch boxes ; on they 

come, fearlessly, to the crossing. 
Then on the curb for a moment they gather as 

behind an invisible dam. 
Will they dare to rush in between the cars and 

carts and carriages ? 
Can they possibly cross without accident ? 
Ah, they know better than we do. 
From the other side of the way their daily 

friend advances to meet them, the gigantic, 

broad-girthed policeman. 
He holds out both hands and they flock around 

him. 
Soon he has a tiny maiden swinging in the air 

on each arm. 



TOWN PICTURES 91 

A half-dozen boys are hanging on to his ample 

coat-tails. 
There are children before him and behind him 

and between his legs, so that he has to 

pick his way. 
He lifts his hand, and as before a new Moses 

a pathway opens across the crowded 

thoroughfare, the flood of traffic banked 

up on either side. 
Confidently relying on this towering pillar of 

protection, the youngsters pass over and 

scamper down the street until the last little 

damsel disappears waving her hand back 

at their champion. 
*^0h, if uniforms and brass buttons always stood 

for that ! ^ 

VIII 

The Hungarian band is in full swing. 

The swarthy little Gypsy leader, with his back 
to the three fiddlers and zither-player, is 
swaying to and fro over his violin, oblivious 
of everything but his half-improvised, 
unmeasured outbursts of minor harmonies. 

Round the tables sit comfortable listeners — 
men, women and children — and before 
each is a foaming mug of amber beer. 

An occasional sandwich of rye bread and Swiss 
cheese with plentiful mustard breaks the 
monotony. 

The music stops and there is much clapping of 
hands, and now a low hum of conversation 
sets in. 



92 TOWN PICTURES 

There is a general sense of satisfaction and good 
humour and leisure. 

The genial red-faced host at the bar beams on 
us like a veritable Gambrinus. 

Even my blond, fat waiter looks as if he liked 
to stand there dreaming, with a napkin 
over the worn sleeves of his black alpaca 
jacket. 

On the walls are brilliant pictures of knights 
and maidens let into the heavy wood work, 
with mottoes from German ballads. 

Can this be the infernal realm of King Alcohol 
of which I have heard so much ? 

Yesterday I was in the country of his enemy, 
the dairy lunch-room. 

Framed Scripture texts were hung up here and 
there above my head, interspersed with 
gentle reminders to " Beware of pick- 
pockets." 

The pale young clerk who sat opposite to me at 
the narrow varnished table, ate his pork 
and beans and buck-wheat cakes for dinner 
in just seven minutes by the clock, and left 
me before I had quite assimilated the fact 
of his arrival. 

All the rest were too busy in doing likewise to 
notice him. 

No one spqke to his neighbour and the only 
dissipation was the universal reading of 
the cheapest evening papers. 

The spare, overworked damsels of uncertain age 
who waited on us, made my heart ache for 
their strident weariness. 



TOWN PICTURES 93 

I was hardly surprised that the habitues made 

such haste to get away. 
Is it any wonder that King Alcohol, with all his 

crimes on his head, should triumph over 

King Temperance, relying solely on his 

prim, dyspeptic, negative virtues ? 
I believe joviality has its place in the Kingdom 

of Heaven. 
I believe the angels are jovial. 
We ought to be jovial without beer, but, failing 

that, a bastard beer joviality is better than 

nothing. 

IX 

It is an August evening in a free roof-garden 
built for the people on a pier over the river. 

I am in a bad humour to-night, and I come here 
to cure myself. 

Crowds are sitting in rows on benches on each 
side of the stand where the brass band is 
playing, and round them and up and down 
the long deck from one end to the other 
passes a continuous stream of promenaders 
under the electric lights. 

I join the shabby procession, but the vulgar 
flirting of those shrill shop-girls with the 
rough young men behind them is quite 
indecent, and offends me sadly. 

I stop at the end of the pier, and look out at 
the dark river with its lights, white, red 
and green. 

It would be altogether beautiful, if it were not 
for the shriek of the ferry whistles in the 



94 TOWN PICTURES 

next slip, and the suggestion of sewage in 
the south breeze. 

But this will not do ; I have not come here to 
complain, but to take my regular cure. 

I sit down on the corner of a bench, not too 
near the musicians. 

And now I begin to love. 

At first it is an effort, and I undertake only the 
children, for they are the easiest. 

There is a baby yonder, jumping on its mother's 
arm in time with the trumpets, and another 
tiny dot dancing across the floor holding 
her pink skirts out with her hands. 

Now I am loving them hard, like a new-kindled 
coal fire with the blower on, and I can 
almost hear my heart roar. 

I have soon reached the point of loving all the 
children (and how many there are), even 
the most perverse, and gradually the 
mothers too move into my focus. 

The old people come next. How I love that 
respectable old Irishwoman there with her 
cap and red shawl, watching her grand- 
child (or is it her great-grandchild ?) — and 
the sturdy German grandsire asleep bolt 
upright in his carefully brushed black 
coat ! I could hug them both, and I do not 
find it easy to keep my hands off them. 

But now my love is boiling over, and becoming 
indiscriminate. 

I can put it to any test and try it on any one ; 
it is a conflagration that would outstrip 
any fire-extinguisher. 



TOWN PICTURES 95 

I turn my heart loose on the shabby procession, 
and now I pronounce it worthy of a place 
on the frieze of the Parthenon, 

I love the pale tailor in his dirty shirt-sleeves, 
with his sickly boy in his arms. 

I love the black hands of the machinist, and I 
am glad that he has not washed them too 
thoroughly. 

I love the thin, grey-haired old maid with 
spectacles (how surprised she would be if 
she knew it !) and the young rowdies who 
are waltzing together. 

Here come the same vulgar youths and maidens 
who shocked me an hour ago, quite as 
vulgar as ever, and yet now I love them 
till I see nothing that is not divine in them. 

Love covers a multitude of sins — indeed it 
does ! 

But the band is playing " Home, Sweet Home," 
and the multitude has already half dis- 
appeared. 

It is time for me to close the draughts and let 
the fire go down. 

My love-cure has worked its wonted miracle, 
and blues and ill humour have gone. 

As a patent-medicine I should like to sing its 
praises and advertise its virtues, until 
whole cities should take it for their muni- 
cipal ailments, and statesmen prescribe it 
to their several nations. 

Who says there is no panacea ? 

Love is the great panacea ! 



96 COUNTRY PICTURES 



Country Pictures 

I 

TRAMPING down the broad green valley, 
over the ribs of the mountains, — 
Following the good old dusty road as it winds, 

and catching glimpses of the distant creek 

there below, — 
Breathing it all in, — the summer air, the 

harvest view, the noise of crickets, 

with all our senses confused in one blithe 

ecstasy, — 
Rejoicing in the strength of our legs and walking 

faster now near sun-down than we did in 

the early morning, — 
We are free, — free ! 
We carry no burden to speak of, — we stop 

where we like, — we are chained down by no 

property or respectability — yet we own all 

that we see and feel compassion for the 

people we pass. 
I spy the spire of a village, three miles below 

us, at the turn in the valley. 
We halt and examine our map ; yes, there we 

shall sleep, unless we change our minds 

before we get there. 
Oh, to live ever like this, with our shirt-sleeves 

rolled back well above the elbows and our 

arms browning like the best of meer- 

chaum, — 



COUNTRY PICTURES 97 

Never to resort again to our prisons, — to be 
forever on our own feet, like yon hawk on 
y its own wings ! 

Men made carriages and bicycles and motor- 
cars and ambulances and hearses, but God 
made legs ! y 



II 

They are taking the apple-orchard by assault. 

The storming-party are attacking the old tree 
in the corner and the butts of their ladders, 
propped up against it, protrude beneath 
the foliage. 

There is a rustling of leaves, a noise of the soft 
dropping of fruit into baskets, and of the 
low talk of hidden men. 

Now and then the sun shines on the apparition 
of an eager hand or on a bit of checkered 
clothing. 

The red globes (redder on the south side of the 
tree) have half disappeared, and the tree 
is joining the rest of the row behind it in 
sombre mourning verdure. 

Little blotches of Paris-green from last April's 
spraying still spot the leaves. 

A cedar- waxwing, afraid to approach her nest, 
chirps in the nearest tree. 

Over there they empty the baskets on a sail- 
cloth stretched on the ground in the shade, 
and one of the men, seated on it, sorts 
them into piles, jerking the bad ones 
away behind him. 
B. G 



98 COUNTRY PICTURES 

Two others are filling a clean new barrel, and 
the basketfuls fall in with a hollow musical 
rumble. 

They screw down the top with a hand-press, 
squeezing the apples against each other, 
and they drive in the nails around with a 
sharp click. 

A waggon will come to-night and draw the 
barrels away to the river, and they will go 
down to the harbour in a freight-boat, and 
then they will board a great steamer and 
set sail to cross the Atlantic on the morrow. 

They are aU going to England, and in another 
fortnight their ruddy tinge will be tinting 
fresh English cheeks. 

I stand under a tree and pick the fruit over my 
head, occasionally slipping as I tread on 
the windfalls in the grass, destined later for 
the cider-barrel. 

There is a delicious aroma of apples in the 
air. 

A dozen ripe fruit hang in a row above me from 
a slender switch of a branch bent nearly 
double by their weight, and it rises out of 
my reach as I pluck them one by one. 

There is something almost sensuous in the feel 
of three big apples on one twig as I grasp 
them in one hand and twist them off with 
a turn of the wrist. 

A grasshopper perched on an apple lying on the 
ground seems to be watching me at my 
work. 

I would like to pack the atmosphere of the whole 



COUNTRY PICTURES 99 

cheerful scene away in the barrels and send 
it over sea too, and with it heaping basket- 
fuls of good will. 

How I wish that they could taste the added 
flavour ! 

But wait ! In my world, when I have created 
it, all other fruit will taste sour, and my 
apples will drink in friendliness to as good 
purpose as they now absorb the sunshine. 



Ill 



Sleighing swiftly westward into the late sun- 
set. — 

The deep snow lies white over all, hill and plain 
and distant Catskills. 

The broad river is a solid shimmer of white, 
sown with diamonds. 

The stone wall bounding the road on the left is 
hidden in snowdrifts. 

The wall on the right is topped and corniced 
with new-born marble. 

The branches of the black hemlocks are bending 
heavy laden with whiteness. 

Before my cutter the track extends, two deep 
ruts with a silvery pink streak at the bot- 
tom of each, polished by burnished runners 
and leading up to the western sky. 

A layer of crimson rests upon the sweep of 
snowy horizon ahead, tinting the rolling 
snowfields with rosy shades. 



100 COUNTRY PICTURES 

My horse, Charley, lets himself out at a full trot 

along one of the deep ruts (for the shafts 

are so hung that he may follow the one on 

the left), and the soft snow between the 

runners just grazes the bottom of the 

sleigh. 
He is so warm under his long furry hair that a 

cloud of steam rises from his back and 

sides. 
His girdle of jubilant bells rings out and gives 

voice to his own delight in his speed and 

the crisp fresh air. 
Oh, the exhilaration of it ! 
What poet inventor discovered the eternal 

affinity of snow and sleigh-bells ? 
And I, too, am warm under my furs and wraps, 

a clumsy oasis of heat in the midst of arctic 

cold. 
Only my fingers ache a little now and again, 

and I must hold the reins in my right 

hand for a time and thrust my left in 

its thick woollen glove under the lap robes 

and work my fingers until they are warm 

again. 
My upper lip is stiff with its frosted moustache 

and my ears tingle j ust enough to make me 

appreciate my glowing body. 
I love the frozen, swift white road, free from 

dust and mud and motor cars. 
I love the beautiful white cold earth and the 

beautiful pink, cold sky. 
Not a breath of wind disturbs the intensity of 

their stillness. 



COUNTRY PICTURES loi 

(There is no noise in the sleigh-bells, for theirs 
is only the spirit of tone.) 

I would not be banished for all the year to the 
noisy, buzzy summerland and miss for 
ever this pure hushed zone of crystal and 
silver. 

I love to be a coal of fire in the midst of the 
polar frost. 

It is warm under the snow, too. 

Think of the myriads of living things, of chip- 
munks and woodchucks, of toads and 
insects, and creatures that creep and fly, 
snuggling and all tucked in under the kindly 
coverlet. 

They sleep through the winter night — with 
the white counterpane on top and the 
warm, green blanket underneath. 

There are big rough bears dreaming over there, 
too, on the mountains. 

Think of the millions of seeds and eggs ready to 
burst forth when the sun lifts their bed- 
clothes and gives them a tepid bath in the 
year's new morning. 

The earth is as warm as I am under its wraps, 
and, like me, only here and there in its 
moustache and fingers does it feel the hurt 
of the keen, clear air. 

We are brothers — swift, warm brothers — the 
earth and Charley and I — carrying our live 
coals of joy through frigid space, with only 
pain enough to accentuate the pleasure. 

And the sleigh-bells — the sleigh-balls — are our 
music of the spheres. 



I02 THE LIVING UNIVERSE 



The Living Universe 



WHAT are you, stars of night, revolving, 
journeying, pulsing ever — 

What are you, planets, visible and invisible, of 
this and other systems — 

What but life magnified — the life of my frame 
and tissue infinitely, stupendously magni- 
fied ? 

Throw away your microscopes, O naturalists ! 
your naked eye is as good as any magni- 
fying glass. 

Will you ever see clearer into germ or proto- 
plasm than you see into the living heavens 
with their shining molecules ? 

II 

I know the secret of the universe. 

Now at last I have found out what ails it. 

The universe is in love. 

It is giving itself a prodigious reckless hug. 

It hugs too hard, but it loves too much to give 

any heed to protests. 
Its love is the source of all pleasure and the 

source of all pain. 
It loves the lively birds and beasts and the 

strenuous men who feed on them and the 



THE LIVING UNIVERSE 103 

beautiful microbes and tumours that feed 
on the men, and most of all it loves the 
tremor and friction and oppugnance be- 
tween its loves, and sets its teeth to the 
shock and thrill of them. 

There is a bite in its burning kiss that gives vent 
to love's unbearable intensity. 

The universe needs safety valves, and we are 
its safety valves. 

If it were not for its outlet through us and our 
agonies, it would go mad or explode. 

Yes, there is an agony in love and the universe 
is in love. 

Gravitation is love and the attraction of atoms 
for each other is love. 

The vibrant light is love, and the tingling of 
heat is love. 

The planets, straining in their orbits, trace 
" love " on the face of the heavens. 

The perplexed waves, drawn now skyward, now 
earthward, write " love " all over the sea. 

Love sucks the rivers to their sources and the 
sap to the tips of the trees. 

Love clasps star to star and molecule to mole- 
cule. 

There is nothing but love. 

All life is nothing but hugging, and the uni- 
verse is one long excruciating embrace ! 



104 LOVE 



Love 

I 

WHEN I thought you were perfect and 
far above our shps and trips, it was 
an effort to love you. 
But now that you have confessed your fault, 
(so like my own fault that I have never con- 
fessed) I am drawn irresistibly to you. 
How can they love in heaven where there 
are no common weaknesses to bind them 
together ? 

II 

What do you love most in your sweetheart, — 
that which she shares with all others, or 
the inexplicable thing which differentiates 
her from them all ? 

When the deep underlying humanity is as 
fascinating to us as the shallow variations, 
what will then become of all our billing and 
cooing and pairing ? 

Ill 

Do you love each other only ? 

It will soon burn out, — that love. 

One love will devour the other. 

Try loving the world together, and turn your 

bonfire of shavings into a blast-furnace 

with all the universe for fuel. 



LOVE 105 

IV 

There is something beyond brotherhood. 

Brotherhood is very good in its way, but court- 
ing and wedlock are better. 

I had rather woo the world than be brother to 
it. 

I want my life to be one long love-story. 



There is a higher love than ours at its best. 

The love which we know has too much alloy in 
it of pity and compassion. 

I want no one to pity me, and, by the Golden 
Rule, I must not indulge too deeply in the 
luxury of pitying others. 

I want my mother to keep out of my eyes. 

I do not wish my voice to quaver, nor do I 
willingly lose control of my countenance. 

The " Ewig-Weibliche " is better than self- 
seeking and barbarism, no doubt, but we 
shall find something still higher beyond it. 

There is a love that can give and take on equal 
terms without a tremor of the under-lip, 
— which stands as firm on its base as 
yonder Catskills, — which flows as broad 
and steady as the Hudson at their feet. 

Let us press forward to that supreme love. 

VI 

What is this talk of egoism and altruism, as if 
they were at enmity with each other, and 



io6 GOD'S WINDOW 

not rather the twin sides of character, 

growing symmetrically and with even 

balance ? 
The infinite love of Jesus made him conscious 

that he was the Son of God, and that he 

and the Father were one. 
Could his egoism have gone beyond this in its 

effort to overtake his altruism ? 
Nay, love the Lord thy God, — in thyself, — the 

deepest egoism ; 
Love thy neighbour, — and the Lord thy God 

in him, — the widest altruism ; 
Love God in all things, for this is the one 

commandment. 



God's Window^ 

GOD has a house that's wide and tall, 
And I'm a window in his wall. 
How clear and pure I ought to be 
If God must view his world through me ! 



MY SOUL 107 



My Soul 



" l^T rHAT must I do to be saved ? " 
V V O narrow, selfish, trivial question ! 

Implying no mere selfishness of a minute or 
hour or day, but a whole eternity of in- 
growing soul. 

Is my salvation a matter of such importance ? 

Those only are saved who do not care whether 
they are saved or not. 

The soul can indeed save itself, but only by 
forgetting itself, and jumping overboard 
out of itself. 



II 

I found my soul lying neglected, and I picked 

it up and wondered what the strange 

mechanism was for. 
I went to school to learn what use to make of 

my soul. 
They taught me to think with it, but it strained 

and creaked and nearly gave way under 

the ordeal. 
They showed me how to amuse myself with it, 

but it speedily got out of order and refused 

to work. 



io8 MY SOUL 

Then they trained me to hate with my soul, but 

it broke down utterly and nearly fell to 

pieces. 
I came back from school disgusted with my 

soul and my teachers. 
It was long after (alone, lying on my bed in the 

night watches) that it flashed upon me 

what my soul was for. 
Why did none of them tell me that my soul 

was a loving machine ? 



Ill 

Are there extinct suns revolving dark and in- 
visible through space, waiting for their 
fires to rekindle ? 

Such I feel myself to be as I follow my dim 
orbit. 

Oh, to be a sun, a burning shining sun, with 
healing in its beams. 

Radiating all that is best in it so that all within 
its circle is made clean and wholesome and 
warm ! 

I am a dynamo with the current turned off. 

When will they turn it on ? 



IV 

Living at low pressure, — 
Scarcely enough steam up to keep in motion at 
all,— 



MY SOUL 109 

Going through the forms of conviction and 
enthusiasm on the memories of full, ecsta- 
tic hours warmed over, — 

I wait despondently for the moment of com- 
plete collapse. 

But no. The power rises ; the pressure re- 
doubles ; the heat kindles ; the heart 
quickens. 

I shall once more really live, and there are still 
full ecstatic hours in store. 



I can hardly keep from smiling indecorously 
this sunshiny morning as I walk along 
Broadway, I am on such good terms with 
everybody ; 

They are all such good fellows, I am sure they 
are. 

I wish I could think of some one who had served 
me a bad turn, so that I might play him a 
good one in revenge. 
^ What a luxury forgiveness is ! 

I am in serious danger of loving my enemies 
more than my friends to-day,— 

I am under such obligations to them for bring- 
ing out all that is most delicious in me. . 

The sun is shining this morning inside and out. 



no MY SOUL 

VI 

You who would convince me of my immortality 
by means of mysterious rappings in dark- 
ened rooms and magic slates and moving 
tables, 

How hopelessly beside the mark are all your 
efforts ! 

I have Moses and the prophets, David and 
Isaiah, Paul and John, Tolstoy and Whit- 
man, and if I hear not them, neither shall 
I be persuaded though one rose from the 
dead. - 

The man who is deaf to the prophets has failed 
to become conscious of his own immortal 
self, and the self that he cherishes shall 
die, all the slates and tables to the con- 
trary notwithstanding. 



VII 

I stand wistfully at the door. 

I want to go in but the price of admission is too 
high for me. 

I say that the door is shut, — that there is no 
room for me within, — that others are 
keeping me out, — that it would be selfish 
to go in alone, — but I know it is all untrue. 

What I mean is that the price is too high. 

And what is the price ? 

The price is simply to go in, — to take the one 
short, necessary step across the threshold. 



MY SOUL III 

VIII 

Prayer is not an asking for things, 

Nor a solemn repetition of good words, 

Nor a Hindoo wheel turning in the wind. 

Prayer is a vital change. 

It is the deepening of the soul. 

It is the shifting inward of my centre of gravity 

toward the great Source of life. 
This is the only prayer. 
And there is but one answer to prayer, and 

that is the influx of the waters of life 

welling up within me. 



IX 

No far-away despot, 

No worn tradition, 

No shadowy background for Nature's give and 

take. 
No algebraic insoluble X, nor mark devised to 

stand for an unknowable infinity. 
No arbitrary postulate or working theory, 
No guess in the dark, — 
My God is none of these things. 
Nay, God is an experience of the soul. 



X 

Stop rummaging in the past for musty causes, 
O scientist ! 



112 MY SOUL 

Seek not the living among the dead. 

Life is, — not was, — and must ever continue to 

be. 
How can the vanished columns of ages ago 

sustain our present temples ? 
Then search, not for dead causes, but for the 

Living God. 



XI 

At the source of my being, — 

At the point where life wells up within me, — 

There my soul opens out into a new and wider 
plane, — 

There I am in touch at all points with all 
things, — 

There I feel dim suggestions of another di- 
mension, — hints of the unfolding of new- 
celestial vistas from every commonplace, 
familiar spot of earth. 



XII 

But I seldom venture into the spiritual storm- 
centre which is myself, — 

That vortex of the contending east and west 
winds of truth ; — 

I fear the strain upon my outer self too much. 

I live for the most part on the outskirts with 
back turned and fingers in ears, gazing at 
the rigid world outside. 



MY SOUL 113 

And yet I know, and am content to know that 
sooner or later I shall be drawn in and 
through and up, beyond the east wind and 
the west wind, and the rush and roar of 
opposites, and the duel of good and evil, 
to the balance and poise which are even to 
a greater degree myself. 



XIII 

O my heart's flood, run high ! 

Thou round bright magnet of the midnight 
skies, bend down and lift the waters till I 
overflow and float, buoyed up in my own 
liquid atmosphere, while love and truth 
come rushing in from the eternal sea to fill 
the void. 

To be filled, to run over, to float,— what is there 
else to live for ? 

O my heart's tide, run high ! 



XIV 

Madness, divine madness ! 

Who ever hved a hfe worth living without 

madness ? 
Who ever saw the ineffable dream and came 

back completely sane ? 
There is a comprehensive sanity above the 

madness, but that is beyond human reach. 
The only other sanity is that which men share 

with other animals and trees. 
B. H 



114 MY SOUL 

We cannot rest in that. 
Onward, upward, to the other, — through the 
madness ! 



XV 

As I He in my bed at night, 

I go forth and hover over the many-mansioned 

city. 
I can see into all its multitudinous homes, and 

I give of myself with both hands to the 

eager, expectant inmates. 
Hungrily they lift their arms toward me and 

we are drawn to each other. 
But I am also drawn upward by an attraction 

from above ; I do not descend, — I rise, 

and they rise with me. 
Like an aeronaut throwing off ballast, I go up, 

up. 
Then, when I should attain the acme of all, I 

am left in confusion. 
There is light there, — and peace, — and intense 

action, — I feel it, — but it all baffles me, — 

baffles me again and again, 
As I lie in my bed. 

XVI 

Poised in the buoyant atmosphere of universal 
love, all things may fall away from my 
soul, and yet leave it still secure, self-cen- 
tred in the firmament. 



I 



MY SOUL 115 

I float in a sea of love. 

Can there be love without a Lover, I wonder. 

Is love the mere act of lovers, or are lovers 

episodes and eddies in the ocean of love ? 
Which comes first, love or lover ? 
Does personality blossom into love, or does 

love wake into personality ? 
I know not, but I float in a sea of love. 



XVII 

In the dark. 

Between the stars without and the stars within, 

My soul is deftly hung and balanced. 

How rarely I go out to look at the stars at 
night ? 

And when I go out how seldom I lift my eyes 
to heaven ! 

And in the other inner dark, how there too I 
shun the constellations, and, when I am 
not actually sleeping, how I hug the 
candle-light and lamp-light instead ! 



XVIII 

When my compass is deranged and the needle 
vacillates idly round the horizon, — 

When the constellations seem hopelessly tan- 
gled and I cannot tell the Great Bear from 
the Southern Cross, — 



ii6 MY SOUL 

Even then there is one sure resource, — 
I can still tug at my anchor-chain and feel it 
rooted in the solid earth. 



XIX 

My soul is a tree, a drowsy, monotonous tree, 

but what care I ? for the birds come and 

sing in its branches. 
Only the common garden birds stay long enough 

for me to describe them to you, and chirp 

plainly enough for me to learn their song. 
But what of the scarlet birds of the woods that 

alight for a moment and then in a moment 

are off again ? 
What of the flitting shadows of song that will 

not be scrutinized, while they pour forth 

weird minor shivers of melody whose bass 

notes vibrate into eternity ? 
I cannot tell you of them. You must watch 

your own branches for them. 
No tree is so dead but the birds will sing in its 

branches. 



XX 

What is this within me which sometimes when 

I am bent on enjoyment, peremptorily 

cries out. Nay ? 
Is it not my best self, jealous of some other, 

outer, lower mastery and anxious to 

assert its sway ? 



MY SOUL 117 

What is this within me which, when I have 
learned the lesson, gently whispers, " Now, 
if you still care to, do as you wished " ? 

Is It not still the same hidden captain, sure 
now of my loyalty and trusting me far 
afield ? 

At last he knows that even in the heart of the 
enemy's country I shall not think of 
deserting. 



XXI 

1 cannot enjoy a thing freely so long as I am 
subject to it,— so long as I cannot do 
without it. 

I must master it and pass beyond it before I 
can turn round and enjoy it.-" 

If you wish to own a thing, let it go. 

Hold fast to it, if you wish to be its slave. 

The chess-player keeps his head well above the 
board. 

He rises superior to it, he looks down upon it, 
he knows this is only a game. 

Play as he does with your passions and appe- 
tites. 

Move them about as pawns wherever you would 
have them go, 

But remember that hfe is something other. 

Then even if the game is lost, defeat will not 
have reached you at your point of vantage. 



ii8 MY SOUL 

XXII 

Who would lead a life tedious with tame suc- 
cesses ? 

There is nothing so dull, so dispiriting as suc- 
cess, for it robs me of my chief treasure, 
the future. 

It takes the relish out of life and leaves nothing 
behind. 

It is defeat that is bracing, — 

To feel that defeat was powerless to reach 
you,— 

To lose all and exult to find yourself still in- 
tact, — 

To be impregnable and eternal and independent 
of things and conditions, — 

To possess the essence of victory in your un- 
conquerable courage. 
/ Life is a school wherein failure is a better 
teacher than success.^ 



XXIII 

Where are the cowards who bow down to en- 
vironment, — 

Who think they are made of what they eat 
and must conform to the bed they lie in ? 

I am not wax, — I am energy. 

Like the whirlwind and waterspout I twist my 
environment into my form, whether it will 
or not. 

What is it that transmutes electricity into 
auroras, and sunlight into rainbows, and 



MY SOUL 119 

soft flakes of snow into stars, and ada- 
mant into crystals, and makes solar 
systems of nebulae ? 

Whatever it is, I am its cousin german. 
i I too have my ideals to work out and the uni- 
verse is given me for raw material. 

I am a signet and I will put my stamp upon 
the molten stuff before it hardens. 

What allegiance do I owe to environment ? I 
shed environments for others as a snake 
sheds its skin. 

The world must come my way — slowly, if it 
will — but still my way. 

I am a vortex launched in chaos to suck it into 
shape. 



XXIV 

I want nothing, nothing, but you, O Truth ! 

Give yourself to me, — my arms are open wide. 

Drive away the illusions that tremble at your 
approach. 

I do not care how you may look to my dis- 
torted eyes. 

After my long debauch with these phantasms 
I may find you uncomely, — but you are 
comely, — you only are comely. 

Deep down within me, — deeper than I think 
or feel or dream, — even there I need you, — 
there is your empty throne. 

And Truth whispered, " Love,— and I will 
come." 



120 MY SOUL AGAIN 



My Soul Again 

HERE, where I live (thus spake my soul 
To me whose hair is turning grey), 
No clock doth chime the flight of time, 
For we know it is Now all day. 



Here, where I live (thus spake my soul 

As it smiled at the white that flecked ray 
hair), 

No milestones show the road we go, 
For our Here is Ever3nvhere. 

Grow old, if you will (thus spoke my soul). 
But I am as young as a new-born child. 

Though your head be hoar and burden sore, 
I am strong and free and wild. 

So I thanked my cheery childlike soul, 
And laughed to know that all was well ; 

And I turned away from my head of grey 
And went to my soul to dwell. 



MICROCOSM 121 

You 



I WOULD not break your will, for, like mine, 
it is a sprout of the infinite will. 
I might indeed wish to transform it, but so 
long as it is will, let it have its way. 

11 

''''Express yourself. 
Whatever you are, out with it ! 
We do not want a world of masqueraders. 
Make yourself felt, — make your real self felt. 
Put your private stamp upon the future. 
Make the world go a bit differently from what 

it would have gone if you had never been 

born. 
Imitate no one, — saint, sage or hero. 
Be yourself, and perhaps you will find that 

you are by your own birthright one of the 

elect. , 



Microcosm 

I SPLIT a grain of common sand 
And behold ! within it lay 
The vaulted universe bespanned 
By the uttermost Milky Way. 

I delved in my narrow soul, and lo ! 

At my being's inmost core 
I saw the eternal Godhead glow 

And the heavenly hosts adore. 



122 HINTS 

A Prayer 

COME to me, woo me, Soul of the All ! 
Early and late, 
As I labour, I wait 
For thy quickening call. 

Carry me off, O thou Soul of Desire, 

For a moment of bliss. 

To the central abyss 
In thy chariot of fire ! 

Let me know in the long quiet years that succeed, 
Looking down from above 
On the gross forms of love, 

What it is to be freed. 

Hints 

LITTLE care we for the mark 
At which our winged words are aimed ; 
Just aside there in the dark 

Lurks the thought we never named. 

So the vague magnetic pole 

In the boreal skies afar 
Like a disembodied soul 

Haunts the obvious polar star. 

Not the star at which we gaze 

Thrills and joins our souls on high, 

But the one whose furtive rays 
Catch the corner of our eye. 

Not the songs the poet sings 

Set our ears and hearts a-ringing. 

But unutterable things 

Which he stops just short of singing. 



APOLOGIA 123 



Apologia 



I PULLED up the flowers in my garden, for 
I had learned that they were poisonous. 
Yet I loved them, — purple and red and white, — 

and I pulled them up with tears. 
My garden was a desert and my garden was 

all my life. 
In the morning I went to weep again in my 
garden, and I found these pansies growing 
wild where my tears had fallen. 

II 

A motto for critics, Be silent on your blind side ! 
There are things that you reck not of. 
There are worlds that you know not. 
There are forces to which you are impervious. 
No one of us can see and appreciate the whole. 
Let us then hold our peace in the dark. 

Ill 

We who have been there have all beheld the 
same landscape. 

We make use of different symbols, — we may 
seem to talk contrariwise, — we may even 
misunderstand and denounce each other, — 



124 APOLOGIA 

but read between the lines and you will 

perceive that our descriptions tally. 
If we repeated each other's story by rote, like 

the witnesses in an Oriental law-suit, you 

would do well to disbelieve us ; 
But note our divergencies and our enthusiasm 

and recognise the very ear-marks of truth. 
Trace them back to their misty, radiant source, 

and you will apprehend the only thing 

worth knowing. 



IV 

You must listen to me for I have something 
to say. 

You will not like my form of speech, but I 
know no other. 

You will resent my sharp words, but I have no 
blunt arrows in my quiver. 

You will try to shake me off and go to sleep 
again, but I will not be shaken off ; and 
even into your sleep I will inject the fer- 
ment of my dreams. 



V 

My ideas dangerous ? 

But how is it with your own ? 

Your idea for instance that it is quite right for 
men in uniform to slaughter each other,— 
an idea which slays its thousands every 
day? 



APOLOGIA 125 

Your idea that it is proper for you to pocket 
as much of other men's earnings as the law 
allows, — an idea which fills the world with 
poverty, starvation, disease and death. 

And all your other silly time-worn ideas. 

Is it your ideas or mine that are dangerous ? 



VI 

(After the Chinese.) 

I played my lute to the world, but the world 
danced not and went on its way unheeding. 

Only here and there I saw a solitary dancer, 
unnoticed of the rest, in an obscure 
corner. 

And I grieved at the world, for I loved my 
music. 

But when I looked again and discerned who 
they were that danced to my lute, for- 
sooth I sorrowed no longer ; 

For they were the children of the new day. 



126 AFTERTHOUGHT 



\ 



Afterthought 

TyJ/'HEN these new ideas of ours heco^ne 
trite, — 

When they pass glibly current from 7nouth to 
mouth without conviction or comprehen- 
sion, — 

When the clean-cut edge of the mintage is rubbed 
off and the impression half obliterated, — 

Then there will be a shade of sadness even iji 
victory ; — 

Then we shall have to pray for the advent of new 
truths and new heretics. 



Butler and Tanner The Selwood Printing Works Frome and Lj3ndon 



iUl 18 19C5 



